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FICTIONAL RAMBLES IN AND 
ABOUT BOSTON 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

in & about 

By 

jfranccs Weston Carrutf) ft 

Author of "Those Dale Girls" "The 
Way of Belinda" etc. 



ALDI 




NEW YORK 
ft£c£Iurc, tftyiHiptf an& Companp 

MCMII 



RY OF 

NOV. 10 1902 

CLASS (X' XXc. No. 

B. 2 






Copyright, 1902, by 
McClure, Phillips & Company 



Published October, 1902, N 



Co ttjosc 15o0tontan0 

$0y &unt0 

Cl)r0f Hamblrs in S^fir City 

2it affectionately ^IngrribfD 



CONTENTS 

PART I. IN MODERN BOSTON P4rv 

1 AGE 

i Beacon Hill and Street . . 3 

11 The West End 21 

in The Charles Street Neigh- 
bourhood 49 

iv In and About the Common . . 61 

v A Ramble Round the Public 

Garden 88 

vi The Back Bay 109 

vii The South End 144 

PART II. IN OLD BOSTON 

1 About the Wharves . . . .157 

11 The Heart of the Old North 

End 176 

in In and Around Dock Square . 204 

ix 



CONTENTS 

iv State Street and the King's page 
Chapel Neighbourhood . . 220 

v When Commercial Boston Was 

Residential 2 45 

vi In Tremont Street and Music 

Hali 26 7 

PART III. ABOUT BOSTON 

1 Cambridge and Lexington . . 283 

11 Harvard 3 T 3 

in Westward 339 

iv Toward the Blue Hills . . 346 

v Nahant and Nantasket . . . 365 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Longfellow's Grave Frontispiece 

The gilded dome of the State House 5 

The Old Beacon 8 

The Athenreum ir 

An Ancestral Home in Mrs. Moulton's "Miss Eyre'" ... 13 

Tablet marking site of Hancock House 15 

The home of Mildred Wentworth 17 

The semi-circular windows of the Somerset Club. — -Crawfords 

''American Politician " 19 

Beacon Steps. — Howetts's "A Woman 's Reason" .... 23 

Mount Vernon Place 27 

41 Mount Vernon Street— the home of Mrs. Harrison Gray 

Otis 28 

48 Mount Vernon Street — the home of the Coreys .... 29 
The perfect Gothic arch formed by the trees that line both sides 

of Mount Vernon Street. — Helen Reed's "J/tss Theodora " 31 

No. 59 Mount Vernon Street 35 

A row of old houses in Mount Vernon Street 39 

82 Mount Vernon Street — the home of the Randolphs ... 41 

Home of Rose Jenness in "Two Bites at a Cherry" ... 42 
I.ouisburg Square — former homes of Louisa Alcott and Mr. 

Howells 43 

73 Pinckney Street — the home of the Lacys ...... 46 

African Methodist Church, 68 Charles Street ... . . 50 

The Church of the Advent and Clergy House, Brimmer Street. 51 

Charles Street 54 

xi 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The Telescope in the Mall 63 

Ticknor Mansion. Union Club. Park Street Church. Mall 65 

The Common ... 69 

The Long Path 73 

The Pond in the Hollow 77 

Cows on the Common Si 

The Liberty Tree 85 

The Public Garden 91 

The Statue of Washington, near Commonwealth Avenue . . 96 

Venus Fountain in the Public Garden 97 

The Swan Boats 99 

The Arlington Street Church from under the Kilmarnock wil- 
low by the pond in the Public Garden 103 

\n Apothecary's Window, Mentioned in James's "Bostonians" 105 

The Home of Mrs. Mesh in Arlington Street 107 

Home of Mrs. Adams ("Truth Dexter") in Beacon Street . . 10S 

The Harvard Bridge — part of the Back Bay Ill 

296 Beacon Street (The Oval Doorway), the home of " The 

Autocrat." 302, the home of Mr. Howells 120 

Marlborough Street 122 

Mrs. Rangeley's house on Marlborough Street. — Arlo Bates s 

" The Puritans" 123 

The Home of the Maxwells . . 124 

The Home of the Chauncey Wilsons 125 

The Avenue through the Park 126 

The St. Botolph Club — No. 2 Newbury Street 127 

233 Clarendon Street — the home of the late Bishop Brooks 128 

Trinity Church 129 

Interior Trinity Church . 133 

The Library 137 

The Museum 139 

xii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The latter-day edition of the historic < >ld South Church . . 141 

Concord Square 145 

28 Rutland Square — the home of Mrs. Louise Chandler 

Moulton 152 

The Shipping at the foot of State Street 159 

The inspiration of a bit of Hawthorne allegory 164 

The old Salt House, where Hawthorne wrote " The Scarlet 

Letter" ... 167 

The Lieutenant-Governor's elegant mansion 178 

Frankland's house 182 

The Home of Paul Revere 1S3 

Salutation Alley 186 

The Old North Church 189 

Home of the M'Murtaghs. — Stimsoris "Pirate Gold" . . . 193 

The house on Hull Street, where Gage is said to have planned 

the Battle of Bunker Hill 194 

Copp's Hill Burying Ground 195 

The spot from which Lionel Lincoln watched the battle of 

Bunker Hill 199 

The House of John Tileston in Bynner's " Zachary Phips" . 201 

Union (Boston) Stone 206 

Faneuil Hall 207 

The old Brasier Inn 210 

A bookshop in Cornhill 211 

The Old State House 221 

The Old Colony Bank 226 

Burying-ground by King Charles' Chapel 231 

Kings Chapel . 235 

Interior of King's Chapel 239 

Greenough's Statue of Benjamin Franklin — City Hall . . . 242 

The Corner Bookstore 243 

xiii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Old South Church 259 

Province House 265 

Grave of Benjamin Woodbridge 270 

Entrance to the Music Hall 275 

Mansion at Medford 2S7 

Christ Church Graveyard 291 

Birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes 295 

Washington Elm 298 

The Longfellow Mansion 299 

Elmwood 303 

The Road to Concord 307 

Monroe Tavern — Lexington 308 

Lexington Common 310 

The Lexington Minute Man 311 

The Johnston Memorial Gate and Harvard Hall 317 

The College Yard 321 

The Library 325 

Holworthy 329 

Memorial Hall 335 

Country Club, Brookline . . 342 

The Upper Charles River 345 

The Governor Shirley Mansion 351 

Jamaica Pond 354 

A Roxbury Garden 355 

The Quincy-Butler Mansion 359 

The Stream. — Stimsoti 's " King Noanett" 363 

The Cliff. — Stimsoti 's " Pirate Gold" 366 

Pulpit Rock, Nahant 369 

Nantasket Beach 375 



INTRODUCTORY 

" Come, seek the air ; some pictures we may gain 
Whose passing shadows shall not be in vain." 

Holmes. 

AWORLD of fascinating romance un- 
folds itself to those who seek to iden- 
tify the homes and haunts of the 
characters in Boston fiction. If, as the great 
dramatist has told us, it is the part of the po- 
et's genius to give to airy nothings a local 
habitation and a name, it may interest the ad- 
mirer and follower of the makers of fiction to 
devote himself to searching out and giving - 
permanence to persons and localities which, 
though in sober fact they never had any exist- 
ence, yet have been and always will be as real 
as any historic characters of the past ; forming 
a drama of life such as is woven by the artist 



INTRODUCTORY 

in colours so vivid and impressive that the ac- 
tors become a part of ourselves — their haunts 
and habitations to be individualized, identified 
and held in tender remembrance. 

To the traveler the Old World owes its at- 
tractiveness quite as much to the creations of 
Shakespeare, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bal- 
zac, Hugo and Dumas as to the princes, states- 
men and soldiers of whose births and deaths 
history tells us with so much pomp and preci- 
sion. It was said by an admirer of Henry 
Esmond that the charm of the Potomac River 
was not in the military associations so insepa- 
rably blended with it, but in the fact that on 
its banks Esmond and the woman who had so 
patiently waited for his wooing had established 
themselves ; linking the noble Virginia stream 
with the memories of the Stuarts and Addison, 
with the English meadows and with the cam- 
paigns of Marlborough. Gibraltar's towering 
might impressed a devotee of Marryat not as 
being England's gateway fortress of the Med- 
iterranean, held more than once against a world 



INTRODUCTORY 

in arms, but as the scene of the exploits of Mr. 
Midshipman Easy and the discomfiture of the 
surly boatswain. Every year a throng of tour- 
ists wander through the land of Evangeline 
asking persons native to the soil to point out 
localities whose names, as a rule, mean nothing 
to them who are questioned, unless, perchance, 
they may have read Longfellow's immortal 
poem. Robinson Crusoe's island has been ex- 
plored as thoroughly as for buried treasure — 
the seekers looking not for gold or iewels, but 
to identify the spring, the cave, or the spot on 
the sands where Robinson was startled by the 
solitary footprint. 

So Boston has been the scene of much that 
will live in American fiction ; but it ma)' be 
doubted if it has yet fulfilled all that may be 
required of it by the poet or novelist. For 
many years it was the town not only of New 
England, but of North America, leading polit- 
ically and commercially as well as intellect- 
ually, but the men who gave it world-wide 
fame in literature were not writing fiction. 



INTRODUCTORY 



Puritan theology stamps the first Boston lit- 
erature which, gradually showing a tendency 
toward broader development, took the form of 
essays and poetry. About 1830 Nathaniel P. 
Willis, Boston bred but not born, was the fore- 
most youne American writer. " Longfellow 
was not yet conspicuous," says Holmes. " Lo- 
well was a schoolboy. Emerson was unheard 
of. Whittier was beginning to make his way 
against the writers with better educational ad- 
vantages whom he was destined to outdo and 
outlive. ... If the reader wishes to see the 
bubbles of reputation that were floating, some 
of them gay with prismatic colours, half a cen- 
tury ago, he will find in the pages of a small 
volume entitled Truth, A Gift For Scrib- 
blers, a long catalogue of celebrities he never 
heard of." 

Of all the brilliant classic-literature-making 
group which later centered about Emerson and 
Longfellow, only Hawthorne and Holmes 
strayed into the realms of fiction. James Rus- 
sell Lowell, perhaps, should be included, for he 



INTRODUCTORY 

published a novel called My First Client which 
met with a dubious fate and long ago disap- 
peared. Those were the days when " Liter- 
ature in Boston," says Mr. Howells, "was so 
respectable and often of so high a lineage that 
to be a poet was not only to be good society, 
but almost to be good family." As poet and 
essayist, Holmes, "the last leaf upon the tree," 
wrote of the Boston which he knew and loved 
with a deeper sense of kinship and affection 
than any of his contemporaries. But the 
scenes of his fiction are with one exception 
away from the city by him clubbed " the Hub." 
This exception is TJie Guardian Angel — one 
of what an old lady called his "medicated 
novels," to the great amusement of the author. 
In spite of all that novelists have had to say 
about Boston, to Mr. Arlo Bates belono-s the 

o 

distinction of having presented it in kaleido- 
scopic form. The many-sidedness of the town 
and the marked characteristics of its people 
which stamp them Bostonese the world over 
pervade his novels, giving them an intense 



INTRODUCTORY 

localism which is never provincialism. He 
strikes the true key in presenting it on its 
sesthetical, ethical, fashionable, practical and 
religious sides — the evolution of modern 
Boston emerging from pro-Puritanism. This, 
in a more or less degree, is the Boston we find 
in the pages of such fiction as Truth Dexter, 
The Sentimentalists, Margaret Warrener, The 
Turn of the Road, Miss Brooks, Ballantyne 
and Her Boston Experiences. Mr. Howells, a 
dominant writer of Boston fiction, saturating 
his pages with its business, social and intel- 
lectual atmosphere, personifies varied types, 
which, photographic as they are, fail to present 
certain phases of the genuine Bostonese. This 
may be because of his tendency to draw " a 
Bostonian, not the Bostonian," which was Dr. 
Holmes's way of putting it in referring to one 
of his characters. The Bostonians was chosen 
by Henry James as the title for a novel in 
which he finds ample space for elaborate and 
brilliant analysis of women of the class of 
Olive Chancellor, amoncr whom the movement 



INTRODUCTORY 

for the emancipation of their sex was rampant ; 
other and equally strenuous types appear in 
the pages of his New England Winter. A 
brilliant literary and legal light of Boston, 
Judge Robert Grant, has purposely refrained, 
he says, from giving his novels a Boston set- 
ting, and one looks in vain through his fiction 
for the streets and monuments of his native 
city. Politically, Mr. Crawford with An 
American Politician and Mr. Wainwright 
with A Child of the Century have the field 
pretty much to themselves. Delightful and 
thoroughly genuine are the Bostonians of Dr. 
Edward Everett Hale and Mrs. Louise Chand- 
ler Moulton, while we turn to Mrs. Harrison 
Gray Otis's The Barclays of Boston for a pic- 
ture of fashionable life in the Hub in the 
fifties. Other phases of this and an earlier 
period are depicted in Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's 
fiction and in such novels as Mr. Stimson's 
Pirate Gold, Miss Cummins's The Lamplight- 
er, and Mr. Trowbridge's Martin Merrivale. 
The old colonial town, rich in history and 



INTRODUCTORY 

traditions, strongly appealed as a background 
for romance to Hawthorne, Cooper, Bynner 
and Lydia Child. 

Writers of Boston fiction have as a rule 
made use of the actual street nomenclature, 
which greatly aids the rambler to discover in 
fact or conjure up in imagination real or ficti- 
tious haunts and habitations. Much of this 
nomenclature is picturesque and interesting as 
reminiscent of the city's history. In that part 
of the town known as the North End the 
crooked, narrow, winding streets such as Fleet, 
Moon, Garden Court, Prince, and Hanover are 
suggestive of the old London so dear to the 
heart of the early colonists. Every Bostonian 
knows that Beacon Hill and street take their 
name from the old beacon erected in 1634 on 
the summit of the hill ; that Tremont Street 
is from Traemount or Tri-Mountain which the 
settlement was first called ; that Shawmut Av- 
enue gets its name from the peninsula. More 
modern is the broad avenue named for the Com- 
monwealth and running across it the street 



INTRODUCTORY 

named for the State. The great Copley and the 
lesser Allston are suggestive of the art world; 
Blackstone, Franklin, and Boylston are remem- 
bered while now and then the name of a na- 
tional hero appears on the lamp-posts, as in 
the recent instance of Dewey Square. 



IN MODERN BOSTON 



I. BEACON HILL AND STREET 

TR U E to the traditions of the Bostonese, 
all the fiction writers of the city pay 
their tribute to the State House with 
its splendid gilded dome, which stands on the 
summit of Beacon Hill. 

Around the green, in morning light, 
The spired and palaced summits blaze, 

And, sunlike, from her Beacon height 
The dome-crowned city sfireads her rays. 

" High in the air, poised in the right place, 
over everything that clustered below, the most 
felicitous object in Boston — the gilded dome of 
the State House," writes Henry James in 
A New England Winter. Mrs. Campbell's Bal- 
lantyne, in her novel of that name, returning 
to Boston from the west, stretched his arms to 

3 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the Sfilded dome, as if he would embrace it and 
all Boston at once. And the Autocrat's most 
celebrated saying is, " Boston State House is 
the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry 
that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of 
all creation straightened out for a crowbar." 
Again and again he lovingly reverts to it. 
" Boston," at another time he writes, " has glor- 
ified her State House and herself at the expense 
of a few sheets of gold-leaf laid on the dome, 
which shines like a sun in the eyes of her citi- 
zens, and like a star in those of the approach- 
ing traveller." 

Opposite the State House steps the fictional 
rambler finds the impressive Shaw monument 
where Mr. Pier's vacillating hero of The Senti- 
mentalists paused to ponder on the contrast of 
the fine young soldier's life with his. He had 
come up to the gray marble slab, says the 
author, rising from the ed<re of the Common. 
" On the other side of it was the bas-relief in 
bronze of Robert Shaw, leading his coloured 
men. Vernon had passed the memorial with- 

4 




" High in the air, poised in the right place, over everything that 
clustered below, the most felicitous object in Boston — the gilded 
dome of the State House." — Henry James's " .V<t.' England 
Winter" 

"lie stretched his arms to the gilded dome as if he wouid em- 
brace it and all Boston at once." — Helen Campbell's "Ballantyne." 



I \ AND ABOUT BOSTON 

out raising his eyes, but now as he stood at a 
distance, with only a glimpse of the back of the 
monument, the form and features of the un- 
faltering young soldier were outlined in his 
mind, with the thought, ' And he was not as 
old as I when he died.' ' 

On the eastern side of the State House has 
been erected a shaft to mark the site of the old 
beacon which first threw its light across the ad- 
jacent waters. 

One stately summit from its s/iaft shall pour 
Its deep red blaze along the darkened shore ; 
Emblem of thought , that, kindling far and wide, 
In danger's night shall be a nation's guide, 

sings the poet Holmes in A Rhymed Lesson. 
The stately summit was frequently climbed by 
the redcoats of Cooper's Lionel Lincoln for a 
better viewof the doings of the town. Here the 
scene of the novel opens in April, 1775, with a 
large group of spectators spreading from its 
conical summit far down the eastern declivity, 
all gazing intently on a distant sail making 
toward the harbour. Under the beacon, beside 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the tall post that supported the grate, Ralph, 




" One stately summit from its shaft shall pour 
Its deep red blaze along the darkened shore ; 
Emblem of thought, that, kindling far and wide. 
In danger's night shall be a nation's guide." — Holmes. 

echoed by Job, reproached Major Lincoln for 
his loyalty to the King's cause. Down its steep 
decline, in their childhood, Lincoln's cousins, 
Cecil and Acmes, many a time went coasting-. 






IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

At the northeast corner of Beacon Street, 
across from the State House, in a house recentlv 
torn down, lived the hero of a Hawthorne ro- 
mance entitled My Kins/nan, Major Molineux. 
This tale is woven about a zealous Boston pa- 
triot named Molineux who died in 1774, and 
a rather amusing light is thrown upon Haw- 
thorne's story of him by a contemporary writer, 
who* says : "It is a curious irony of fate that 
Major Molineux should have a false place in 
literature at the hands of both Longfellow and 
Hawthorne. The despite done to his memory 
by the former is less serious than that of the 
latter. In the Tales of a Wayside Inn in the 
prelude, the poet writes of the famous hostelry : 

And flashing on the window pane, 
Emblazoned with its light and shade, 
The jovial rhymes that still remain, 
Writ near a century ago 
By the great Major Molineux, 
W hom Hawthorne has /in mortal made. 

It is not needed to know the character and po- 
sition of the 'great Major' to see that the 
'jovial rhymes' were not written by him but by 

* Bates's Writing Masters before the Revolution. 

9 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

his son, who signed his name to them on the 
pane. These are the rhymes : 

What do you think 
Here is good drink 
Perhaps you may not know it. 
If not in haste 
Do stop and taste 
You merry folks will short' it. 
Boston, 24th June, 1774, 

William Molineaux, Jr. 

Not long after William Junior was roughly 
handled in an altercation with some of the 
Welsh troops. The sentiments of the family 
were well known to the soldiers. Longfellow 
says : ' Whom Hawthorne has immortal made.' 
If the reader will turn to A Snow Image and 
Other Twice Told Tales, it will be seen that 
the kind of immortality given the ' great Major ' 
by Hawthorne is of doubtful value ; in short, 
it completely reverses his character and sends 
him down to posterity as a hated Tory, tarred 
and feathered by outraged neighbours. At the 
culmination of his story Hawthorne writes, 
1 Right before Robin's eyes was an uncovered 






IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

cart. There the torches blazed brightest, there 
the moon shone out like day, and there in tar 




" When she came to the Athenaeum, she was 
so tired that she decided to take refuge beneath 
its friendly shelter." — Eliza OrneWhiie's "Miss 
Brooks." ' 



and feather)- dignity sat his kinsman, Major 
Molineux.' " All of which may be resented by 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the historian ; but fiction is not fact and the 
charm of Hawthorne lies in his romancing. 

East of the site of the Molineux house is the 
Hotel Bellevue, where for many years Louisa 
M. Alcott stayed when she came down from 
Concord. Opposite it stands the old Ath- 
enaeum, soon to be removed to the Back Bay, 
but on its present site a landmark and distinc- 
tive Boston institution. This aristocratic li- 
brary has been frequented by many characters 
in the fiction of Boston. Mrs. Harrison Gray 
Otis tells us that old Mr. Edgerton daily read 
the newspapers there ; Henry James's Mrs. 
Daintry (A New England Winter) made, re- 
markably free use of it ; two of his Bostonians, 
Olive and Verena, in pursuit of their studies, 
had innumerable big books from it ; in HitJi- 
erto, Mrs. Whitney's Hope Devine was a little 
bit shocked at standing face to face with 
some of its statuary, particularly the Yenuses, 
and had been half afraid of the Laocoon. Ja- 
net Brooks (Miss Brooks), Mary's younger 
sister, took shelter in its vestibule on a 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

storm)- day, and to her infinite relief and 




" Nan lived in an ancestral home where British officers had 
danced stately minuets when Massachusetts was a colony." — Mrs. 
Louise Chandler Moultoris "Miss Eyre" 

pleasure was there discovered later by John 
Graham. 

13 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

In colonial times and until 1863 there stood 
just west of the State House, in Beacon Street, 
the Hancock mansion, than which, as all who 
recall it will testify, there was never a more 
stately or picturesque house. It was sur- 
rounded by a beautiful garden, and many a 
Bostonian can yet sniff the delicious fragrance 
of the lilacs which clustered about the door 
and over the wall, perfuming the whole neigh- 
bourhood in the spring. Its owner, Hancock, 
its traditions and associations are richly histor- 
ical, and it is not without fictional interest as 
well. Hancock appears in the pages of Cham- 
bers's Cardigan, where the hero thus describes 
him : "He was young, handsome, decidedly 
vain, though quite free from affectation of speech 
or gesture. . . . He wore an apple-green coat, 
white silk stockings, very large silver buckles 
on his pumps, small-clothes of silver-net, tied 
at the knees with pea-green ribbons, which fell 
to his ankles, and much expensive lace at his 
throat and cuffs." 

It is probable that the Hancock House was 



I N 



AND ABOUT BOSTON 



the one Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis had in mind 
in picturing Mr. Edgerton's home in The Bar- 




"We turn away from the old mansion so easily conjured up by 
the imagination and see in reality on a low iron fence, a tablet which 
marks the site upon which it stood." 

clays of Boston. Calling it the Amory mansion 
in Miss Eyre, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

also uses it as a setting- for her Nan Amory, 
who " lived in an ancestral home where Brit- 
ish officers had danced stately minuets when 
Massachusetts was a colony." Nan is intro- 
duced to us in the thick of Theosophical win- 
ter. " It always is the something winter in 
that wonderful city," says Mrs. Moulton, "but 
perhaps nothing else had ever taken hold of it 
as did Theosophy. If you went out to drink 
five-o'clock tea and shake hands with your 
neighbours, you found the company broken up 
into groups, and in the centre of each one 
some eloquent woman discoursing of reincar- 
nation, and Karma, and Devachan." Reluct- 
antly we turn away from the old mansion, so 
easily conjured up by the imagination, and see 
in reality on a low iron fence a tablet which 
marks the site upon which it stood. 

A few steps up the street, in a house now 
occupied by Dr. Paul, we can imagine dear lit- 
tle Mildred Wentworth (T. B. Aldrich's A 
Christmas Phantasy) in her blue room over- 
looking the Common, having her deliciously 

16 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

fantastic day-dreams in the midst of her new 
Christmas toys. Farther down the hill, at No. 




" In her blue room overlooking the Common 
was little Mildred Wentworth in the midst of her 
Christmas toys." — T. B. Aldrich's "Christmas 
Fantasy." 

40, is the stoop where Margaret Allston had 
one of the first of Her Boston Experiences, 
and which house, she says, is in the one block 

17 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

in that locality where certain families honour- 
ably continue their ancestral line. 

In this part of Beacon Street lived May 
Calthorpe, that diverting young- woman in 
Mr. Bates's Love In a Cloud. " The dwell- 
ing was rather a gloomy nest for so bright a 
bird as May. Respectability of the most aus- 
tere New England type pervaded the big 
drawing-room. The heavy old furniture was 
as ugly as original sin, and the pictures might 
have ministered to the Puritan hatred for art. 
Little was changed from the days when May's 
grandparents had furnished their abode ac- 
cording to the most approved repulsiveness of 
their time. Only the brightness of the warm 
April sun shining in at the windows, and a big 
bunch of dark red roses in a crystal jug, light- 
ened the formality of the stately apartment." 

In the middle of this block is the vine-cov- 
ered, ultra-exclusive Somerset Club, where 
Warren Hartwell put in half his days before 
he met Margaret Allston. It was also the 
rendezvous of Marion Crawford's American 




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19 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Politician and his friends, one of whom, Van- 
couver, was particularly fond of standing- in 
one of the semi-circular windows and watching 
the passers-by. At the corner below is the 
smaller Puritan Club, likewise a haunt of 
Warren Hartwell's ; and of Vernon Kent, one 
of the sentimentalists in Mr. Pier's novel of 
that name. The atmosphere of this locality 
is sympathetically expressed by the heroine of 
Her Boston Experiences, who says she " al- 
ways peers around for a fleeting glance of 
Priscillas, John Aldens, or other far-away peo- 
ple who rightfully belong among those quaint 
old houses, still breathing out history and ro- 
mance." 

II. THE WEST END 

FOR the western and northern slopes of 
Beacon Hill many novelists have a 
strong predilection, notably Mr. How- 
ells, who, particularly on the northern side of 
the hill, finds in the homely life of the unfash- 
ionable residents ample material for the por- 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

trayal of certain types of Bostonians which he 
presents to us with such fidelity. These are 
"those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West 
End of Boston which are now almost wholly 
abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer 
classes. Yet they are charming streets," and 
in them lived the Hallecks, the Hubbards (A 
Modern Instance), Lemuel Barker {The Min- 
uter s Charge), Dr. Olney, Rhoda Aldgate 
and Mrs. Meredith (An Imperative Duty), 
and many other of Mr. Howells's fictitious char- 
acters. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, too, is partial 
to this locality with its " streets of charming 
houses without any modern improvements over 
behind Beacon Hill, and beyond the State 
House. In her recent story, Miss Theodora, 
Helen Leah Reed gives us a delightful series 
of pictures of the old West End. 

Number 9 Beacon Steps (Howells's A Wo- 
man's Reason) is given as the residence of 
Joshua Harkness and his daughter Helen. 
" The house was rather old-fashioned, and it 
was not furnished in the latest taste, but it 




"BEACON STEPS." — HOWELLS's "a woman's REASON." 

" Streets of charming houses over behind Beacon Hill and beyond 
the state House." — Mrs. A. /). T. Whitney's '■'Hitherto" 



-3 



IN AND A B O U T BOSTON 

made the appeal with which things out of date 
or passing- out of date touch the heart." Bea- 
con Steps is not Beacon Street, says Mr. 
Howells in the novel, " but it is of like blame- 
less social tradition." 

As an actual street it never had any exist- 
ence in fact, but the name was suggested to 
Mr. Howells by a short flight of steps which 
lead down from the State House to Temple 
Street, and though no definite house was in- 
tended, this was the locality he had in mind. 
In another of his novels, A Modern Instance, 
his Clover Street is in reality Myrtle Street, 
where, a few doors from Joy Street, is the little 
house rented by the Bartley Hubbards. "It 
seemed absurdly large to people who had been 
living for the past seven months in one room ; 
and the view of the Back Bay from the little 
bow-window of the front chamber added all out- 
doors to their superfluous space." To the east 
of them, at 63 Hancock Street, is the boarding- 
house to which Janet ( Eliza Orne White's Miss 
Brooks) came in search of young Rheinhart. 

25 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Passing down Derne Street and through 
Bowdoin Street, we come to Bulfinch Place, 
on the right, called Canary Place by Mr. 
Howells, who finds lodgings there for the 
Bartley Hubbards shortly after they came to 
Boston. Here, too, on the southern side of 
the street, is the Hotel Waterson, described 
in The Minister s Charge as the St. Albans, 
where Barker worked in various capacities un- 
til (in the novel) the hotel burned. North of 
this, in Bowdoin Square, is the Revere House, 
in and around which transpires much of An 
Imperative Duty. The Bartley Hubbards also 
stopped at this hotel, where Bartley entered 
his name on the register with a flourish. Bril- 
liantly lighted Bowdoin Square and the high- 
pillared portico of the Revere House were also 
wonderingly observed on his wanderings by 
Barker's The Minister s Charge. This hotel 
was one much patronized by Mr. and Mrs. 
Howells during their residence in Belmont 
when, attending social functions or the theatre 
in Boston, they found it more convenient to 

26 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

spend the night in town. " Some colour of 
my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious 




" That commodious nook which is known as 
Mount Vernon Place."' — Henry James 's "A New 
England Winter.'" 

experiences of people in my books," Mr. How- 
ells says in his Literary Friends and Ac- 
quaintances. 

If we now climb "those up-hill streets that 
converge to the State House," and stop at the 

27 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

top of the Hill, we come directly under the 
shadow of the dome, to " that commodious 
nook which is known as Mt. Vernon Place," in 




41 MOUNT VERNON STREET — THE HOME OF MRS. 
HARRISON GRAY OTIS 



which resided Henry James's Miss Lucretia 
Daintry (A New England Winter) — delightful 
Miss Lucretia, "who wore her bonnet as scien- 
tifically poised as the dome of the State House, 
and had in an eminent degree the physiog- 
nomy, the accent, the costume, the conscience, 
and the little eyeglass of her native place." 

2S 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 




48 MOUNT VERNON STREET THE HOME OF THE 

COREYS 

" The whole place wears an air of aristocratic 
seclusion." — Howells's "Rise of Silas Laphafti" 



North of this "nook" is Mount Vernon 
Street, in which lived an astonishing- number 

29 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

of fictitious persons, whose literary creators 
give it a preference over Beacon Street as an 
aristocratic residential thoroughfare. A fine 
old house, Number 41, at the corner of Joy 
Street, was the home of Miss MehitableOuincy, 
whom we meet in Mrs. Louise Chandler Moul- 
ton's Miss Eyre. This house has interest in 
fact as well as fiction, for here lived that bril- 
liant woman, novelist and social leader, Mrs. 
Harrison Gray Otis, who wrote The Barclays 
of Boston there. 

A few doors down on the same side of the 
street is Number 48, the home of the Coreys 
(Howells's The Rise of Silas Laphani). This 
house is now a small hotel called the Curtis, but 
was formerly the home of one of Mr. Howells's 
friends, and its entrance and part of the inter- 
ior remain as when he knew and described it. 
To many, Bromfield Corey is by far the most 
delightful of Mr. Howells's creations, and it is 
with pleasure that we meet him in more than 
one of the author's books. No one forgets 
that memorable dinner given for the Laphams 

30 




I? 



&.=< 



v 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

by the Coreys, in the reading of which we can 
scarcely be made to believe that we are not 
actually attending it, so strong is Mr. How- 
ells's realistic touch. Familiar with the dining 
room we are keenly interested in the rest of 
the house, and delighted when we are permit- 
ted by the author to wander into Mr. Corey's 
sanctum, the library, where Lemuel Barker 
(The Ministers Charge) "found himself 
dropped in the midst of a luxury stranger than 
the things they read of in those innumerable 
novels. The dull, rich colours on the walls, 
the heavily rugged floors and dark wooded 
leathern seats of the library where he read to 
the old man ; the beautiful forms of the famous 
bronzes, and the Italian saints and martyrs in 
their baroque or Gothic frames of dim gold; the 
low shelves with their ranks of luxurious bind- 
ings, and all the seriously elegant keeping 
of the place flattered him out of his strange- 
ness." Corey, at this time, it will be remem- 
bered, was alone at home while his family were 
at the shore, because he " would rather be blind 

33 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

in Boston than telescopic at Beverly or any 
other summer resort." 

Looking down from the Coreys, we get a 
most beautiful view of " the perfect Gothic 
arch formed by the trees that line both sides 
of Mount Vernon Street" (Helen Reed's Miss 
Theodora). At Number 59, at the top of the 
hill, we find the home of the poet and novelist, 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His near neighbour 
is the imaginary Mrs. Buskirk (Pier's The 
Sentimentalists), who lives in one of this " row 
of stately fine old houses, with little plots of 
lawn in front and high iron fences ; they were 
of four high-ceilinged stories with well-propor- 
tioned bay-windows and deep vestibules, in 
which were tall jars of plants and palms." In 
his Two Bites at a Cherry, Mr. Aldrich speaks 
of crisp crocuses blooming in these little front 
yards in the spring. 

Mr. Arlo Bates rarely has an actual house in 
mind in describing residences, but so real to 
him are the homes of his characters that he 
has fallen into the way, he says, of inserting an 

34 




35 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

imaginary house in the desired locality. So, 
though the action rambler may not literally 
number them, he can pretty safely conclude 
that in this block of Mount Vernon Street 
lived Mrs. Gore {The Puritans), in whose 
drawing-room occurred the Persian reading 
when " Persian was the latest ethical caprice," 
and one of the forms of the " ethical jugglery, 
the spiritual and intellectual gymnastics such 
as the Bostonians love." Here we also find 
" the iron gate which, between stately stone 
posts, shuts off the domain of the Frostwinches 
{The Puritans) from the world, and marked 
with dignity the line between the dwellers on 
Mount Vernon Street, and the rest of the 
world." If we follow Ashe and Mrs. Fenton 
into the drawine-room of this house, we enter 
"an apartment whose very walls were incrusted 
with conservative traditions. . . . The chief 
decoration, one felt, was the air of the place's 
having been inhabited by generations of so- 
cially immaculate Boston ancestors. There 
was a savor of lineage amounting almost to 

37 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

godliness in the dark, self-contained parlours ; 
and if pedigree were not in this dwelling im- 
puted for righteousness, it was evidently held 
in becoming reverence as the first of virtues." 

In this exclusive neighbourhood must have 
lived Peter Calvin {The Philistines), "a 
wealthy and well-meaning man against whom 
but two grave charges could be made — that 
he supposed the growth of art in this country 
to depend largely upon his patronage, and that 
he could never be persuaded not to take him- 
self seriously. Mr. Calvin was regarded by 
Philistine circles in Boston as a sort of re-in- 
carnation of Apollo, clothed upon with modern 
enlightenment, and properly arrayed in re- 
spectable raiment." 

Judge Rathmire, whose fortunes were so 
closely intermingled with The Curse of the 
Old South Church, is described in that novel 
as living in splendid style in Mount Vernon 
Street. A view of the charming block of 
houses before which we have been loitering 
was to be had by the Rents ( Pier's The Senti- 

33 




a ^ 



39 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

mentalists), who lived directly opposite in a 
thin, flat-fronted house by which Mr. Pier 




82 MOUNT VERNON STREET — THE HOME OK 
THE RANDOLPHS 

"He had almost reached their house when he 
saw a slender girl coming down the steps." — 
Miss Whites "Miss Brooks." 

meant anyone of the several that answers to 
this description. Helow the Kents on the same 
side of the street at Number 82, is the house 

41 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

in which the creator of the happy-go-lucky 
Randolphs (Miss White's Miss Brooks) im- 




" One of the last spells of the past was lifted 
for him when he saw strange faces looking out 
of those sun-purpled window-panes." — 7'. B. 
Aldricli s " Two Bites at a Cherry" 

agined them as living. Here the Brooks girls 
stayed with their sister when they were in town, 
while on the steps of this house Janet had that 
chance encounter with fohn which so changed 
the current of her life. 

42 



• IT 






£ 


u 






•V 




« 


-r 


. 




- 



3 -2 
craq 
i. ■ 



= *S O 



.2 c 



43 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

John T. Wheelwright, to whose Child of 
the Century we have made allusion, lives at 
Number 99 Mount Vernon Street, and wander- 
ing from here through Willow and into Chest- 
nut Street we find a few steps up the hill a 
beautiful and well-preserved old house which 
answers to the description of the home of 
Rose Jenness in Aldrich's Two Bites at a 
Cherry. Whitelaw, the hero of this story, re- 
turning- to Boston after fifteen years' absence, 
found " people whom nobody knew occupied 
the old mansion. One of the last spells of the 
past was lifted for him when he saw strange 
faces looking out of those sun-purpled window- 
panes." This picturesque, vine-covered resi- 
dence was at one time the home of Edwin 
Booth, and is now used as a private school for 
boys. 

Returning through Willow Street and cross- 
ing Mount Vernon we come into quaint old 
Louisburg Square, where, on the south side we 
find the former homes, a few doors apart, of 
Louisa M. Alcott and Mr. Howells. At Nuin- 

45 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

ber 2 Silas Lapham and his associates first 
came into being - , though the book was not 




73 PINCKNEY STREET — THE HOME OE THE LACYS 

completed until after the novelist had moved 
to Beacon Street. In this Square John (Mrs. 
Campbell's Ballantyne) found charming Mrs. 
LeBaron living ; and overlooking the Square, 

4 6 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

in Pinckney Street, was Marion's former home, 
where years later, advised by Mrs. LeBaron, 
Ballantyne found lodgings in the then "anti- 
modern street." This house is Number J^, 
given over to boarders or lodgers, among 
whom one might have discovered Craighead 
( Truth Dexter) before he married. 

The character of this once aristocratic street 
is in these days very similar to the change in 
other parts of the Hill. This is remarked 
upon by Anna Farquhar [Her Boston Experi- 
ences), who says that this is the section reputed 
to be Bohemia. " The majority of the old 
homes in Pinckney Street are converted into 
lodging-houses, although a few professional 
families still occupy an entire house apiece. 
There are to be found rooming spinsters of 
Mayflower descent, generally poor connec- 
tions of the same families residing in Beacon 
Street not far away, — near enough to mention 
frequently and intimately; musicians; news- 
paper people ; painters ; incipient authors and 
a few full-fledged : teachers; composers; im- 

47 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

pecunious youths with high spirits and one 
' dress suit ' among several ; female typewriters 
and private secretaries. Here is the freedom of 
the Latin Quarter, with but a small amount of 
its license. . . . In truth, this Boston Bohemia 
stands for good spirits and innocent uncon- 
ventionality, and is several times more virtuous 
than Boston society, no matter how pretentious- 
ly and flamboyantly the little country tries to 
disprove its virtue." 

This is the atmosphere of that recent and 
brilliant Boston novel, Margaret Warrener, 
though it is evident that the author, Miss Alice 
Brown, is purposely vague in locating that in- 
teresting colony which she calls Babine. And 
in Pinckney Street, we are sure, was the cosy 
third floor sitting-room of that splendid woman 
and sculptor, Helen Greyson (Arlo Bates's 
The Pagans). " The apartment," we are told 
in the opening paragraph of the novel, " was 
evidently that of a woman, as numerous details 
of arrangement and articles of feminine use 
suggested ; and quite as evidently it was the 

4 s 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

home of a person of taste and refinement, and 
of one, too, who had traveled." 

III. THE CHARLES STREET NEIGH- 
BOURHOOD 



F 



ROM the western slope of Beacon Hill, 
where, as Emerson sing-s. 



"Each sired leads downward to the sea, — " 

we come down into Charles Street and a local- 
it}' closely identified with the fiction of Arlo 
Bates, Henry James, Howells and other lesser 
literary lights. At the period of which Henry 
James writes in TheBostonians Charles Street 
was a place of semi-fashionable residences, one 
of which is described by the novelist as the 
home of Olive Chancellor. To-day, like the 
adjacent streets, it is largely given over to 
boarding and lodging houses, so that it is nat- 
ural in many novels to find masculine charac- 
ters lodging - there. 

To enter it from Beacon Street we find a 
few doors along the identical little Italian fruit 
shop where Graham first saw Mary Brooks 

4<; 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 




AFRICAN METHODIST CHURCH 
68 CHARLES STREET 



(Eliza Orne White's 
Miss Brooks). "His 
eyes were arrested by 
the rich colouring of 
the red apples and 
yellow oranges, which 
showed off to especial 
advantage in juxta- 
position to the large 

" She wished densely to sur- 
blinclies of purple round herself with the blackness 

from which she had sprung." — 
and green grapes, Howetlss "An Imperative Duty" 

and the dusky red bananas that hung from 
the walls in great clusters. The dim g-aslio-ht 
gave a semi -obscurity to the place, so that 
its ugly features were softened, and Graham 
thought of certain Dutch paintings he had 
seen abroad. Into this commonplace back- 
ground there presently stepped a figure radi- 
ant with life and colour. . . . Suddenly the 
poor little shop was transformed, and Graham 
thought of Una, whose face 'made a sunshine 
in the shady place.' " 

He followed her from the shop up Mount 
5° 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 




THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT 
AM) CLERGY HOUSE, BRIM- 
MER STREET 



Vernon Street to her 
sister's home, it will be 
remembered, but we 
detach ourselves from 
them at the corner to 
take a passing glance 
at the African Metho- 
dist Church, a rather 
picturesque edifice to 

"The church was appointed which Rhoda (HoW- 
with a richness beautiful to see." 
—Arlo Bates's "Puritans" e 1 1 S ' S J III p C V (I t IV C 

Ditty), sick with the sudden knowledge that 
she was of negro blood, was led to a meet- 
ing by an old coloured woman. " She had no 
motive in being where she was except to 
confront herself as fully and closely with the 
trouble in her soul as she could . . . she 
wished densely to surround herself with the 
blackness from which she had sprung, and to 
reconcile herself to it by realizing and owning 
it with every sense." 

West of this church, clustering at the water's 
edge, is the exclusive Brimmer Street quarter, 

51 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

which tiny section, a novelist has said, covers 
more of the real wit, wisdom and worklliness 
than any one other part of Boston. Here, in 
one of the whimsical little streets, amid some 
strictly Sabbatarian and conventional families, 
and the quality of the artistic life, lived the 
Lesters, an evening at whose house was among 
Margaret Allston's Boston Experiences. Here, 
too, we find the Church of the Advent, with 
its Clergy House, which, under the thin dis- 
guise of the Nativity, plays a conspicuous 
part in Arlo Bates's novel, The Puritans. 
Every one will recall the dramatic description 
of the midnight service at the Nativity. " The 
music on this occasion was most elaborate, 
the very French millinery of sacred music. . . . 
The church, moreover, was appointed with 
a richness beautiful to see. The vestments 
might have moved the envy of high Roman 
prelates, and the altar plate shone in gold and 
precious stones." The Father Superior of the 
Clergy House, in which lived Maurice Wynne 
and Philip Ashe, of the novel, was Father 

52 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Frontford, whom Mr. Bates stoutly denies 
having drawn from the actual incumbent. 
Mr. Bates says he has drawn but one char- 
acter from life, and that was Dr. Ashton of 
The Pagans, whose identity was unsuspected 
save by the prototype and his fiancee. But 
such genius has this author for depicting the 
Bostonese as he really is that there is no one 
of his fictitious characters who has not been 
fitted by the public to some prominent person. 
This has been both amusing and annoying to 
Mr. Bates, whose tribulations in this line were 
undoubtedly in his mind when he wrote Love in 
a Cloud, in which he takes occasion to remark 
that " If the scene of a novel be laid in a pro- 
vincial city, its characters must all be identified. 
That is the first intellectual duty of the readers 
of fiction. To look at a novel from a critical 
point of view is no longer in the least a thing 
about which any reader need concern himself; 
b _:t it would be an omission unpardonably stu- 
pid were he to remain unacquainted with some 
original under the disguise of every character." 

53 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



Near the Church of the Advent, in Brimmer 
Street, stands the bachelor apartment where 
Bellingham lived (The Ministers Charge), 
the delightful interior of which Mr. Howells 
pictures for us most charmingly on the 
morning- Barker breakfasted there. 

To turn from here 



into Charles Street 
again we come upon 
the block of houses 
in one of which lived 
Olive Chancellor 
(Henry James's The 
Bostojiians). After 
Verona came to live 
with Olive, this was 
the only spot in 
Charles Street that had any significance for 
Ransom, the Mississippian, whom we first meet 
in Olive's drawing-room tete-a-tete with her 
sister, Mrs. Luna, who flippantly explains to 
him that Olive is "a female Jacobin — a nihilist, 
consorting with witches and wizards, mediums 

54 




CHARLES STREET 

" — he heard the door open 
within the deep embrasure in 
which, in Charles Street, the main 
portals are set." — James's "The 
Bostonians" 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

and spirit-rappers and roaring radicals." Olive 
had the good fortune to dwell on that side 
of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, 
"the afternoon sun slants redly . . . over 
a brackish expanse of anomalous character 
which is too bie for a river and too small for 
a bay." 

This was also the view to be seen from Gra- 
ham's chambers (Miss Brooks), which were 
high in a house across the way and farther 
down, at Number 127. These lodgings, as 
described by Miss Eliza Orne White, were the 
actual rooms of her friend, Miss Lucretia Hale, 
a sister of Edward Everett Hale, who loved 
her view out over the water, but commonly 
found, as did Graham, that her friends objected 
to the coal sheds in the foreground. Mary, 
the heroine of Miss Brooks, when she came to 
the tea John gave in his chambers, "went to 
the window, from which a pale gray strip of 
Charles River could be seen in the distance, 
with the spires and houses of Cambridge rising- 
above it, and looking in the misty atmosphere 

55 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

like a blurred charcoal sketch. Her attention, 
however, was riveted by some coal sheds that 
loomed up conspicuously in the foreground. 
' You like your view because it is your dispo- 
sition to make the best of things,' she said. 
' Instead of looking facts squarely in the face 
you idealize them. If I, for instance, with my 
different temperament, were in your place, I 
should say plainly, ' Those coal sheds are hid- 
eous ; they spoil my view.' ' Graham, not 
drawn as a Bostonian, but one of the most de- 
lightful men in Boston fiction, is a composite 
sketch from two western relatives of the au- 
thor — one middle-aged and the other a young 
man from whose combined characteristics she 
modelled her hero. 

Before he married and became a United 
States Senator, John Harrington (Crawford's 
An American Politician) had rooms in Charles 
Street, and though Miss Eugenia Brooks 
Frothinoham is va^ue as to localitv, it is safe 
to surmise — since it is the usual abiding-place 
of Boston bachelors in fiction — that Dan and 

5^> 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Garrison {The Turn of the Road) had their 
apartment there. 

At Number 164, on the water side of the 
street, once lived the Autocrat whose library 
windows overlooked the basin of the Charles 
— a view from which he drew perpetual inspi- 
ration. He found the water craft a source of 
endless interest, and the contemplation of them 
caused him to write this noble tribute to wo- 
man : " I have seen a tall ship glide by against 
the tide, as if drawn by some invisible tow-line, 
with a hundred strong arms pulling it. Her 
sails hung unfilled, her streamers were droop- 
ing ; she had neither side-wheel nor stern- 
wheel, still she moved on stately, as if with 
her own life. But I knew that on the other 
side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk 
that swam so majestically, there was a little 
toilincr steam-tuQ- with heart of fire and arms 
of iron, that was hugfginef it close and dra°f- 
ging it bravely on ; and I knew that if the 
little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the 
tall ship, it would wallow and roll about, and 

57 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

drift hither and thither, and gfo off with the 
refluent tide, no man knows whither. And so 
I have known more than one gfenius, hisdi- 
decked, full-freighted, wide-sailed, gay-pen- 
noned, that, but for the bare, toiling arms and 
brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little 
wife that nestled close in his shadow, and clung 
to him, so that no wind or wave could part 
them, and dra^o-ed him on against all the tide 
of circumstance, would soon have gone down 
the stream and been heard of no more." 

Nearby, at 148, we find an interesting liter- 
ary centre in the home of Mrs. James T. Fields, 
who lingers on in the old house so full of as- 
sociations. Not the least of the charms of this 
house, the front of which presents a common- 
place exterior to the passer-by, is the deep 
garden at the rear, with its benches and trees 
and shrubs and flowers, and always at its edofe 
that bit of the sea known to the Bostonese as 
" the river " or " the bay," beloved by Mrs. 
Fields and felt in many of the stories of Sarah 
Orne Jewett, who spends much time with her. 

5S 



IN AND ABOUT B O S T O N 

Quaint and elaborately designed landscape 
screens are to be found in most of the win- 
dows of the Charles Street residences — a 
mark as distinctive of this neighbourhood as 
are the purple window-panes of Beacon Hill. 

Beautiful gardens were not uncommon at 
the West End when Mr. Howells first knew 
Boston, and not far from Mrs. Fields, in lower 
Pinckney Street, which he calls Rumford, he 
pictures in A Modern Instance a charming one. 
" Mrs. Halleck liked better than mountain or 
sea the hiorh-walled crarden that stretched back 
of their house to the next street. . . . They 
laid it out in box-bordered beds, and there were 
clumps of hollyhocks, sunflowers, lilies and 
phlox in different corners ; grapes covered the 
trellised walls ; there were some pear trees that 
bore blossoms, and sometimes ripened their 
fruit beside the walk." It was Halleck. it will 
be remembered, who said : " I don't think 
there is any place quite so well worth being 
born in as Boston. It's more authentic and 
individual, more municipal after the old pat- 

59 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

tern, than any other modern city. Even Bos- 
ton provinciality is a precious testimony to the 
authoritative personality of the city." 

At the end of Charles Street, stretching 
northward across the water, is the bridge where 
Dan {The Turn of t lie Road) walked alone to 
fight the horror of his approaching blindness, 
and there had a chance encounter with Kate 
Randolph, for whom at that time, he found it 
difficult to conceal his contempt. This bridge 
is the one of which Graham [Miss Brooks) said 
that he often wished he could make his poorer 
neighbours feel the refreshment, almost the in- 
spiration in a walk across it just at sunset, or 
in the twilight when the lights were beginning 
to come out one by one. 

In Mar fin Merrivale, Mr. Trowbridge re- 
lates how his hero, accompanied by Cheesy and 
the others in their tramp to Boston crossed 
the bridge to enter the city just at dusk. 
Cheesy, a typical country boy, gives his first 
impressions of the city in a characteristic com- 
ment : " I had no ide' it was settled so clust 

60 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

here." Over the bridge for many years ran 
the horse cars to Cambridge, — a line patron- 
izedby Basil ( Tlic Dostonians) when he went out 
there to see Verona Tarrent — the same tedious 
route over which Mrs. Tarrent had spent hours 
in "jingling, aching, jostled journeys" — what 
Bostonian or Cantabridgian does not remem- 
ber them ? — " between Charles Street and her 
suburban cottage." 

The old wooden bridge of which these 
novelists wrote has given way to a modern 
steel structure, which may or may not make its 
appearance in the Boston fiction of the future. 

IV. IN AND ABOUT THE COMMON 

TO the fiction rambler the Common, that 
great stretch of green a forest of 
splendid trees in the very heart of the 
city, is full of flitting shadows — peopled by 
old friends and acquaintances, whom, in imagin- 
ation we meet at every turn. 

Toiling heavily up the Park Street mall late 
on a hot summer day, we seem to see Mr. 

61 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Joshua Harkness (Howells's A Woman's 
Reason), struggling to get home, but so ill that 
he drops at last on a bench, remaining there 
until an obliging policeman finds a carriage to 
take him home. At the head of this mall Bart- 
ley Hubbard and Marcia (Howells's A Alodem 
Instance), taking their first stroll here one win- 
ter's day, stopped to see the boys coasting 
under the care of the police between two long 
lines of spectators. 

In this mall, too, on one of the near-by 
benches Martin Merrivale, in the novel of that 
name, and the little blind Alice sat many a day 
while he described the beautiful slopes and 
reeal trees about them. " We are in a magmi- 
ficent rolling park," he said to her, " laid out in 
avenues and paths, with long, double rows of 
such trees as I have described, running in al- 
most every direction. The city is on three 
sides, but on the west there is a river that 
gleams like silver. Beyond that are blue hills, 
all asleep under the hazy sky. On che hills 
there are woods and houses, and on the river a 

62 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

slow-moving sail. I wish you could see all 
this, my deal child." The gentle Alice, though 




" Ever since I had a ten-cent look at the tran- 
sit of Venus . . . through the telescope in the 
Mall, the earth has been wholly different to me 
from what it used to be." — Holmes's "Over the 
Tea- Cups ." 

a fictitious character, was suggested to Mr. 
Trowbridge by his friendship with a woman 
who was an interesting psychologic study, she 

63 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

having remarkable prophetic visions, as Alice 
did. 

No doubt Martin and Alice in their walk 
down the mall often encountered near the 
Tremont Street entrance, the telescope man 
whom Holmes has immortalized : " Ever since 
I had a ten cent look at the transit of Venus 
. . . through the telescope in the mall," he 
says, " the earth has been wholly different to me 
from what it used to be." As in the Autocrat's 
time, ever cheerfully ready is he to-day to show 
the wonders of the planet. 

At the head of Park Street, across from this 
mall, stood until within a few years the beau- 
tiful Ticknor mansion — during George Tick- 
nor's time a rallying-point for literary Boston, 
and likewise famed as being the house where 
Lafayette stayed during his visit in 1824. This 
is, undoubtedly, the house where Margaret and 
Laura lived in Mrs. Louise Chandler Moul- 
ton's A Letter and What Came of It. 

Next door down the sloping street is the 
Union Club, shown, as is the mansion in the il- 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

lustration, before either had undergone altera- 
tions. Sewell, Mr. John T. Wheelwright's Child 
of the Century, was a member of this club, and, 
it will be remembered, entertained Strong at 
breakfast there. "Sewell was a beino- brought 
to manhood under the segis of a protective 
tariff and a Puritan ancestry," says his creator. 
" His whole life had been spent on that part of 
the earth's surface which is contained in a cir- 
cle with a radius of five miles, and with the 
tarnished gilt dome of the State House as a 
centre ; that favoured spot of earth where civic 
pride contends for the mastery over human 
souls, with hatred of taxes — for the true Bos- 
tonian never denies his birthplace save to the 
tax-collector. Of course, he had at intervals 
emerged, incrusted with prejudices as with an 
armour, from this magic ring, in short, tangent 
trips, having had the daring to penetrate one 
winter to the mournful live-oaks and gladsome 
skies of Florida, to dodge the treacherous east 
winds ; and in an autumn ramble as far north 
as the Saguenay, flowing majestically through 

67 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the great Canadian forests ; but the centrip- 
etal force of this ' Hub planet,' so to speak, 
had always a much stronger effect upon him 
than the centrifugal ; and like those red woolen 
balls fastened to a rubber string, which in our 
boyhood caused us glee, he sought his native 
town with the more rapidity, the farther away 
from it he strayed. Though he did not revel 
in existence there, somehow he seemed to be- 
long in the old town." 

This is a photographic picture of the con- 
servative Boston type. Sewell, however, was 
capable of doing the unexpected, and in the 
opening chapter of the novel, having suddenly 
decided to go to Europe, we learn that " he 
tacked upon his office-door the legend : ' Back 
in five minutes,' engrossed in his neatest legal 
hand-writing, walked up to his rooms, packed 
his valise, hailed a coupe, and drove to the 
station without a word of good-bye to a soul 
in the city, after thirty years of residence." It 
is interestine to know that Mr. Wheelwright 
originally intended Sewell to be a kind of 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Yankee Pickwick who travelled about in 
search of adventure ; but he crot involved in 
the Mugwump campaign of 1884, and became 
ruined by what Mr. Wheelwright called, in 
speaking of him, " the fatal contact with poli- 
tics." 

Just below the club, Roweny (Mrs. Keats 
Bradford) took an apartment because she liked 
the odour of business which in recent years 
has crept into the street. At the corner, fac- 
ing in Tremont Street, is the Park Street 
Church which Martin (Trowbridge's Martin 
Merrivale) attended. 

On the western slope of the Common is the 
beautiful Beacon Street Mall, which seemed to 
Lemuel Barker (Howells's The Minister s 
Charge) a kind of grove, so attractive and 
home-like to the country lad that he lingered 
on one of the benches, where misfortunes soon 
befell him. Later in his career he took a 
memorable walk through this mall with Made- 
line Swan. Here, too, came Bartley Hubbard 
and Marcia (Howells's A Modern Instance), 

71 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

who, so far from knowing that they must not 
walk in the Common, used to sit down on a 
bench there in the pleasant weather, and watch 
the opening of the spring. 

To the literary rambler the Common holds 
no walk so full of interest as " the long path," 
running down from opposite Joy Street south- 
ward across the whole length of the Common 
to Boylston Street, which the Autocrat and the 
Schoolmistress walked together. " I felt very 
weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust 
habit)," says the Autocrat, " as we came op- 
posite the head of this path on that morning. 
I think I tried to speak twice without making 
myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the 
question, — Will you take the long path with 
me? — Certainly, — said the schoolmistress, — 
with much pleasure. — Think, — I said, — be- 
fore you answer : if you take the long path with 
me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part 
no more. — The schoolmistress stepped back 
with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had 
struck her. One of the long granite blocks 

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73 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

used as seats was hard by, — the one you may 
still see close by the Gingko-tree. — Pray, sit 
down, — I said. — No, no, she answered, softly, 
— I will walk the long pat ' h with you ! " How 
delightful to have been the old gentleman who 
met them about the middle of the way down, 
walking; arm in arm ! The granite seat has 
been removed from the mall, but the gingko- 
tree remains, and no doubt its delicate flutter- 
ing leaves are still whispering love secrets to 
the neighbouring tree-tops. 

From the Joy Street mall across the hollow 
which holds the Frog Pond is the most charm- 
ing view on the Common, we are told by Mr. 
Arlo Bates in The Pagans, one of the charac- 
ters of which novel, Helen Greyson, frequent- 
ly traversed this path on her way from her 
home on Beacon Hill to her studio. The 
Frog Pond is described by Mr. Howells in 
The Ministers Charge as the place where, 
after a wretched night on one of the near-by 
benches, Barker washed his hands and face, 
while other people were asleep all round him. 

75 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Across the green in the Tremont Street 
mall used to sit old Mr. James Bowdoin (Stim- 
son's Pirate Gold) for half an hour before 
breakfast every morning, walking over from 
his home in Colonnade Row over the way. 
And here, no doubt, sat the hero of Looking 
Backward, " finding an interest merely in 
watching the throngs that passed, such as one 
has in studying the populace of a foreign city, 
so strange since yesterday had my fellow-citi- 
zens and their ways become to me." 

The Common, with its malls and well-regu- 
lated intersecting paths, is not now quite the 
sunny meadow and pasture for cows Cooper's 
Lionel Lincoln, in the novel of that name, found 
it when first he came to Boston, though soon 
after his arrival the bucolic rusticity of the 
scene was broken by the quartering of British 
soldiers. The impish Job Pray, whose weird 
and daring- utterances astonished his red-coat 
auditors, told Lionel he objected to the sol- 
diers because they starved the cows. " Boston 
cows," said he, " don't love grass that British 

76 




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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

soldiers have trampled on." Many a time 
in those anxious days Lionel, listening for 
a stir of soldiery on the Common, heard 
only the "faint lowing of cattle from the 
meadows." 

In The Rebels Lydia M. Childs pictures the 
Common invaded by the British, and so, too, 
does Mr. Chambers in his colonial novel, Car- 
digan. " I had never before seen so many sol- 
diers together," says the hero, " nor such a 
brilliant variety of uniforms. The townspeople, 
too, lingered to watch the soldiers, some sul- 
lenly, some indifferently, some in open enjoy- 
ment. These latter were doubtless Tories, for 
in their faces one could not mistake the expres- 
sion of sneering triumph. Also many of them 
talked to the soldiers, which earned them un- 
concealed scowls from passing citizens." 

Of the Common thus invaded Holmes con- 
tributes his picture : 

And over all the open greeti, 

Where grazed of late the harmless kine, 
The cannon's deepening ruts are seen, 

The war-horse stamps, the bayonets shine, 

79 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

The clouds are dark with crimson rain 

Above the murderous hireling ' s den, 
And soon their whistling showers shall stain 
The pipe- clayed belts of Gage's men . 

What would seem to us now as strange a 
spectacle as the cows was the spinning craze, 
which led the belles of the colony to bring 
their wheels to the Common. This odd scene 
Bynner describes in Agnes Surriage. " Rows 
of young women with their spinning wheels 
were busy at work in the open air," he says, 
" while elderly men and matrons went up and 
down the hill to give them countenance and 
keep at a distance the gaping crowd. ' Tis the 
fashion," Frankland explained to Agnes. " to 
encourage industry and thrift ; these are the 
daughters of our most substantial citizens come 
forth here to give an example to the meaner 
sort.' " From the coquetry of the pretty minxes 
he suspected they enjoyed the admiration of 
the swains close at hand, and he laughingly 
hurried Agnes away lest she join the ranks. 

Near the Common half-way down in West 
Street, was the Latin School attended by the 

So 




8i 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

hero of Wheelwright's A Child of the Century, 
and Philip Sanderson in Mrs. Otis's The Bar- 
clays of Boston. just around the corner in 
Mason Street is " the Old Elm, that subter- 
ranean retreat known to bachelors and busy 
husbands," where the elder Craighead ( Truth 
Dexter) heard his son unpleasantly discussed. 
Turning from here through an alley to 
Washington Street, and walking down a short 
distance to the corner of Washington and Es- 
sex Streets, we come upon the exact spot 
where in Revolutionary days stood the Lib- 
erty Tree. Of this section of the town as de- 
scribed in the novels of colonial life nothing 
actually remains ; but strolling in this locality, 
imagination sweeps away the modern business 
blocks and whirr of traffic, to conjure up a pic- 
ture of these stirring days when the Sons of 
Liberty flitted about this neighbourhood, then 
almost pastoral. In The Rebels we are told by 
the novelist that there was shot into Governor 
Hutchinson's rooms one evening an arrow to 
which was fastened a slip of paper bearing 

3 3 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

these words : " Lieutenant Governor, Member 
of the Council, Commander of the Castle, 
Judge of the Probate, and Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court ! You are hereby commanded 
to appear under the Liberty Tree within one 
hour, to plight your faith that you will use no 
more influence against an injured and exasper- 
ated people." Discussing this, the Governor 
explained to Somerville that the Liberty Tree 
was a large elm opposite Frog Lane, where 
the mob dared to suspend their insulting effi- 
gies. This historic tree stood beside a smaller 
one in the yard of a dwelling, where it re- 
mained until the British cut it down in Au- 
gust, 1775. The rambler who finds it difficult 
to picture this in imagination may be inter- 
ested to look up on the wall of the business 
building in Washington, just below Essex 
Street, and see the memorial bas-relief of the 
Liberty Tree, which has been placed there. 

A few steps north, about opposite the present 
Haywood Place, stood in Washington (then 
called Newbury) Street the White Horse Tav- 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ern, of which Miss Child writes in The Rebels. 
"Willing," she says, "to ascertain more fully 
the state of public feeling, Captain Somerville 
entered the White Horse Tavern, and carelessly 
glancing over the London Chronicle, kept a 
watchful eye on those who entered and de- 
parted." There he heard his uncle — Governor 
Hutchinson — unfavourably commented on a- 
mid general mutteringsof discontent by a group, 
in the centre of which was Samuel Adams, ex- 
horting them to remember that nothing- was to 
be gained bv violence; evervthingf bv calm and 
dignified firmness. Poor young Benjamin 
Woodbridge,over whosegrave the Autocrat and 
the Schoolmistress mourned, is said to have been 
a frequenter of this tavern, to which he came for 
his sword before that duel with Phillips on the 
Common, which caused his death. It is of scenes 
similar to those we find graphically described in 
the semi-historical novels that Emerson wrote: 

The townsmen braved the English King, 

Found friendship in the French, 
And Honour joined the patriot ring 

Low on their wooden bench. 

87 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

V. A RAMBLE ROUND THE PUBLIC 
GARDEN 

IN the childhood of a Bostonian born in 1 840, 
what is now the Public Garden was in pro- 
cess of evolution from a public dump and 
desolate ash-heap into something resembling 
its present condition, though many years were 
to elapse before it became the thing of beauty 
it is to-day. It already rejoiced in the name of 
Garden, but its floral inhabitants were few, and it 
was a favourite camping-ground for the circus, 
and the menagerie, together with such side- 
shows as followed in the wake of the clown and 
the elephant. It supported some lofty swings 
for the amusement of the young and with these 
was a fandango, so called, — a tall shaft revolv- 
ing vertically with seats at each end which 
were alternately soared into the air and then al- 
most touched the ground. About this time the 
Garden received its sea-wall of granite, which 
made its western boundary ; and all beyond 
what is now the eastern edge of Arlington 
Street was the Back Bay, where boats sailed and 

88 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

where, in the cold winter, men and boys cut 
holes in the ice, and erecting a canvas screen 
just large enough to shelter them from the 
sweep of the wind, stood spearing eels with 
which the Bay abounded. 

The beautiful Public Garden as it is to-day 
has been made use of scenically by practically 
every writer of Boston fiction — " my Garden," 
as the Autocrat loved to call it with that sense 
of proprietorship so strong in him where his 
beloved city was concerned. 

To enter it at the corner of Beacon and 
Charles Streets is to come at once upon the 
Beacon Street path which Alice and Dan 
( H owells's April Hopes ) paced so slowly when, 
instead of taking his Cambridge car, Dan ling- 
ered in rapturous enjoyment of her society. 
" The benches on either side were filled with 
nurse-maids in charge of baby-carriages, and of 
young children who were digging in the sand 
with their little beach shovels, and playing their 
games back and forth across the walk unre- 
buked by the indulgent policeman. A number 

s 9 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

of them had enclosed a square in the middle 
of the path with four of the benches, which 
they made-believe was a fort. The lovers had 
to walk round it ; and the children, chasing one 
another, dashed into them headlong, or, back- 
ing off from pursuit, bumped up against them. 
They did not seem to know it, but walked slowly 
on without noticing ; they were not aware of an 
occasional benchful of rather shabby young 
fellows who stared hard at the stylish girl and 
well-dressed vouno; man talking together in 
such intense low tones, with rapid interchange 
of radiant glances." Alice, Mr. Howells tells 
us later on, felt out of the social frame in stroll- 
ing here, for this garden path " was really only 
a shade better than the Beacon Street Mall of 
the Common." 

Other young people whose love affairs were 
more or less interwoven with the garden are 
found in Mr. Bates's Love In a Cloud. Every- 
body in their set knew perfectly well, says the 
novelist, that Jack Xeligage had been in love 
with Alice Endicott from the days when they 

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FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

elists to so far diverge from the social code as 
to sit there. Mrs. Daintry (Henry James's A 
Xcw England Winter) always crossed the 
Garden in going from her home on the " new 
land" to Miss Lucretia Daintry's on "the hill," 
and we are given here a brief glimpse of the 
winter aspect of the garden — the denuded 
bushes, the solid pond, and the plank-covered 
walks, the exaggerated bridge and the patriotic 
statues. 

More attractive is it as it appeared to Craig- 
head ( Truth Dexter) crossing it from Arling- 
ton Street on his way from Mrs. Adams's, in 
Beacon Street, " when the flower-beds were 
brilliant with crocuses, tulips and hyacinths. 
The smell of the upturned earth was pungent 
with life. In a single night Spring's bridal 
tunic had by fairy looms been woven." These 
bright patches of flowers are what Dr. Holmes 
called " the pretty-behaved flower-beds " which 
he did not admire so much as nature in a more 
riotous mood. 

Marion Crawford, in An American Poiiti- 

94 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

cian, also comments on the carpet of bright 
flowers. Harrington, the politician, on return- 
ing to Boston in the late spring, found the 
garden a delight. " The breath of spring has 
been everywhere, and the haze of the hot sum- 
mer is ripening the buds that the spring has 
brought out. . . . There is a smell of violets 
and flowers in the warm air, and down on the 
little pond the swan-shaped boats are paddling 
about with their cargoes of merry children and 
calico nursery maids, while the Irish boys look 
on from the banks and throw pebbles when the 
policemen are not looking, wishing they had 
the spare coin necessary to embark for a ten 
minutes voyage on the mimic sea." 

Virginia Kent (Pier's The Sentimentalists), 
a westerner, be it understood, is one of the 
fictitious persons who took great pleasure in 
strolling 1 about and sitting in the Garden. Near 
the Commonwealth Avenue gate it is pleasant 
to sit down on a bench for a moment where she 
lingered " to watch the gardeners who were 
taking the stocks out of a flower-bed and lay- 

95 



FICTIONAL RAMBLEs 




ing them in a wheel- 
barrow, then mould- 
ing and smoothing 
the earth. . . . She 
contrasted thesegood 
workmen with the 
men sitting about on d 
bene;. a ding 

newspapers, and won- 
dered what occupa- 
tion they could ha 
it seemed to her a 
witless sort of life. It 
did not occur to her that most of them wen; 

ling the >apers in search of occupation. 

hington bestrode his fretful and apparently 

harness-hampered steed on one side of her; in 

the centre of a fountain on the other side stood 

.all, all but nude woman, with the extreme 
of bashfulness that a mere frag- 
ment of clothing permits one to assume. And 
r through the sculptor's cynical design, 
or > on of his want of skill, the expres- 

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— /'/ i 



I N AND ABOUT BOSTON 




sion seemed to be of 
an emotion distinctly 

perfunctory and af- 
fected. . . . From the 
pond near by came 
the frequent tapping 
of a gong- as the 
swan-boats, with gay 
awnings, made their 
leisurely circuits and 
discharged the tour- 
ist-. Virginia 
thought the Garden 
rather pretty and just absurd enough to be in- 
teresting — she halt expected to see a banana 
tree grafted onto a beech — just to be decora- 
tively unique, and the gardeners, she said, had 
contrived to make the statues seem designed for 
centres and reliefs to their flower schemes. 
She thought there couldn't be too many statues 
— "the good ones are beautiful and the bad 
ones are quaint. They're different from bad 
poetry or bad pictures." 

97 



" Hartley, who was already be- 
ginning to get up a taste for art. 
boldly stopped and praised the 
Venus." — Hi ■ "A .' 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Westward from the bench where Virginia 
was sitting is the Ether Monument mentioned 
in Truth Dexter, while the Washington and 
Venus statues in close proximity to her are 
many times alluded to in Mr. Howells's fiction, 
notably in The Minister s Charge, where we 
learn that Barker, for the first time in the Gar- 
den, observed the ima^e of Washington on 
horseback and a naked woman in a granite 
basin, which he thought ought not to be al- 
lowed there — the Venus shocked his inexperi- 
ence. Bartley Hubbard (A Modern Inst a nee), 
however, who was already beginning to get up 
a taste for art, boldly stopped and praised the 
Venus. He and Marcia during their first 
months in Boston frequently resorted to the 
Garden, where they admired the bridge and 
the rockwork and the statues. 

Ford ( The Undiscovered Country), who 
strolled here when the whole precinct rested in 
patrician insensibility to the plebeian hour of 
seven, surprised the marble Venus without her 
shower on, but he never sat by the statue, 




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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

preferring- a bench under the Kilmarnock wil- 
lows by the pond. These beautiful willows 
are described in The Sentimentalists, and un- 
der one of them we find Hartwell, the hero of 
Her Boston Experiences, alone on a bench — 
driven to so shocking: a disregard of the con- 
ventionalities by desperation. " I had no 
idea," exclaims the heroine, discovering him 
there, "a Bostonian with connections would 
do anything- so plebeian as to sit in the Public 
Garden on a bench." She and one or two of 
her friends were venturesome enough to sit 
there occasionally, but they were not Bosto- 
nians. 

Bounding the Garden on the east is Charles 
Street, and returning to this thoroughfare we 
get into step with Graham ( Elisa Orne White's 
Miss Brooks), who, walking there with Janet 
unexpectedly, in a desperate mood tells her 
that he loves her. Great is his amazement 
when she replies : " I have cared for you a 
long time. When I am with you I am happy, 
it does not matter where we are ; and when I 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

am away from you, it is the feeling that you 
are in the world too, belonoqnof to me in a 
certain sense, because you are my friend, that 
makes the best part of all my days." This is 
one of the few events in Boston fiction which 
occurs out-of-doors, city life, naturally, not 
lending itself to much action in the open be- 
yond the casual meeting of characters as they 
traverse the streets. 

At the corner of Charles and Boylston 
Streets is the apothecary's window before 
which dear old Miss Birdseye ( The Bostonians), 
who was always round the streets, stood with 
Basil Ransom, the Mississippian, waiting for 
her South End car — she, the while, protesting 
vigourously against the idea that a gentleman 
from the South should pretend to teach an old 
abolitionist the mysteries of Boston. 

This corner and the Providence station near 
by are identified with the delightful, fond-of- 
entertainments Susan and her original escort 
(Susans Escort) whom the humour of Dr. 
Hale has made for us. Susan, finding it un- 




iu3 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

pleasant to go about alone at night in Boston, 
conceived the idea of making herself an escort 
after this fashion : " She bought a cheap and 




"... They stood in the sun, with their backs 
against an apothecary's window." — James's " The 

Bostoiiians." 



light gossamer overcoat, a travelling cap, a 
dozen toy masks and a pair of badly worn 
check pantaloons. She also bought rattan 
enough, and the wire of hoop-skirts, for her 
purpose. She sewed to the bottom of the pan- 

105 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

taloons two arctics. From the rattan, with an 
old umbrella slide, she made a backbone and 
two available legs to support the mackintosh, 
and on the top of the backbone she could ad- 
just either of the masks which she preferred 
with the travelling cap. The whole thing 
would shut together like a travelling easel. 
The mask would go into her leather bag, 
which, like others of her sex, she carried every- 
where. The rest could then be slid into a 
long umbrella case.'' Her adventures with 
this dummy are inimitably told in the story, in 
which we are assured that in the halcyon days of 
"the escort's" first success Susan enjoyed her 
winter of entertainments as she had never en- 
joyed a winter before. For, if you choose, in 
Boston, says Dr. Hale, "there is nothing you 
may not see and hear and know and under- 
stand in the heavens above, or the earth be- 
neath, or the waters that are supposed to be 
under the earth." The clever Susan, who 
lived in the suburbs on the Providence road, 
always on arriving at the station stepped out 

106 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

to that sheltered lee where you wait for Cam- 
bridge Street cars and opened up her new 
friend to his own proportions. It is simple 




The home of Mrs, Mesh in Arlington Street. 
— James's "A N"ew England Winter." 

enough to identify this starting-point of hers 
outside of the now abandoned station. 

Craighead [Truth Dexter), returning from 
Alabama, came in to Boston at the Providence 
Station which loomed positively palatial to the 

107 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



returning traveller. The vista of the Public 
Garden through the narrow framing of Church 
Street, the objurgations of rival cab-drivers, 
the long line of electric cars crawling about the 
corner of Charles like a migration of saturnian 

ants, and the tireless 
current of uncon- 
cerned humanity 
pouring through the 
channel of Boylston, 
— all combined to 
thrill him with a re- 
turning- sense of vital- 
ity and power. Truth 
also £Ot her first im- 
pressions of the city 
here. Ford and Phil- 
lips (Howells's The 
Und red Country) lodged in Bovlston 

Street which runs beside the Garden on the 
south. At the corner of Bovlston and Arling- 
ton Streets, facing the Garden, is the Arlington 
Street church referred to in the same novel. 




" Mrs. Adams lived in that s 

art of Beacon Street which 
fashionable residents are abandon- 
:ashionable dressma"-. 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Beyond this, farther down the street, we pass 
the residence of Mrs. Mesh (James's A New 
England Winter), with whom Rachel Torrance 
spent the winter and where that most tiresome 
of prigs Florimond Daintry, was frequently 
to be found. Just around the corner, east- 
ward, is the residence described as Mrs. 
Adams's {Truth Dexter) "in that sunniest part 
of Beacon Street which fashionable residents 
are abandoning to fashionable dressmakers, 
suffering it to connect, as it were, by the 
handle of a dumb-bell, the two aristocratic 
bulks of the Milldam and Beacon Hill." 

VI. THE BACK BAY 

THE new land, commonly known as the 
Back Bay, was made in the early 
fifties, when the process of filling in 
the bay began, and plans were drawn on which 
were laid out the streets with names which 
seem to have been borrowed from the British 
peerage. Thirty years more or less were con- 
sumed in filling in the bay, with the result that 

109 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

it became the Court End of the city, fulfilling 
the prophecy of its projectors. But those were 
years of dust, of rattling gravel trains, of a be- 
wilderment of annoyances which drove more 
than one of the steady-going citizens into rural 
retirement, and some, it is to be feared, into 
the quiet of the grave. 

This made land forms a scenic background 
in fiction for a dominant phase of modern Bos- 
ton — neither literary, nor sesthetical, nor of a 
distinctive atmosphere, but fashionable and 
up-to-date on a metropolitan model. Regard- 
ing with higfh disfavour this section of the 
town, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney years ago wrote 
of it (Hitherto): "The Back Bay has been 
filled up, and a section of Paris dumped down 
into it." Here we find the " water side of 
Beacon Street" and the "sunny side of Com- 
monwealth Avenue," which, as Mr. Howells 
says, mean so much more than the words say. 
Curiously enough, while the less desirable side 
of Beacon Street is fashionable, the same cannot 
be said of the avenue, where only the " sunny 




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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

side," fashionably speaking", is " possible," and 
no novelist, intent upon picturing smart society 
in the Hub, fails to be cognizant of these dis- 
tinctions. 

Of these two residential streets, Beacon, 
though less beautiful, is more aristocratic. 
Frivolous, worldly Beacon Street, Mrs. Farrin- 
der (James's The Bostonians) called it, to the 
annoyance of Olive, who hated to hear it talked 
about as if it were such a remarkable place, 
and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. 
In A New England 1 Tinier the same novelist 
tells us that Florimond greatly admired this 
(then) new street on the artificial bosom of the 
Back Bay. " The long straight street lay air- 
ing its newness in the frosty day, and all its 
individual facades, with their neat, sharp or- 
naments, seemed to have been scoured, with a 
kind of friction, by the hard, salutary light. 
Their brilliant browns and drabs, their rosy 
surfaces of brick, made a variety of fresh, vio- 
lent tones, such as Florimond like to memorize, 
and the large clear windows of their curved 

113 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

fronts faced each other across the street, like 
candid, inevitable eyes. There was something 
almost terrible in the windows ; Florimond had 
forgotten how vast and clean they were, and 
now, in their sculptured frames, the New Eng- 
land air seemed, like a zealous housewife, to 
polish and preserve them. 

Not far from Arlington Street in Beacon 
was, we imagine, the home of Mrs. Sam Wynd- 
ham (Crawford's A7i American Politician). 
She was a woman, the novelist says, who did 
her duty in the social state in which she was 
called in Boston, reserving the ricrht to do 
many things according to her mood while fol- 
lowing most of the established Beacon Street 
customs. Beacon Street receives Monday af- 
ternoons, and all Boston came to Mrs. Wynd- 
ham's receptions, " excepting all the other 
ladies who live in Beacon Street, and that is a 
very considerable portion of Boston, as every 
schoolboy knows." We are at once told the 
age of Mrs. Wyndham, for " it is as easy for a 
Bostonian to conceal a question of age as for a 

114 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

crowned head. In a place where one-half of 
society calls the other half cousin, and went to 
school with it, everyone knows and accurately 
remembers just how old everybody else is." 
This matter of cousinship on the Hub is also 
commented on by Mr. Arlo Bates in Love In 
a Cloud : " May, as it is the moral duty of 
every self-respecting Bostonian to be, was re- 
lated to everybody who was socially anybody." 
It has been repeatedly said that Marion 
Crawford drew Mrs. Sam Wyndham from a cer- 
tain world-renowned social leader, whose beau- 
tiful home until recently was on "the water 
side " not far from Arlington Street, and he is 
not the only novelist thus accused, for this same 
brilliant woman is at once proclaimed the pro- 
totype of any feminine character of marked in- 
dividuality and social prominence who appears 
in the pages of Boston fiction. Of course, 
knowingly says the public, she is the original 
of Mrs. Sam Wyndham, and of Mrs. Chauncey 
Wilson (Bates's The Puritans), and did not 
Miss Anna Farquhar exactly picture her as 

115 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Mrs. Bobby Short {Her Boston Experiences), 
who always sailed in late to receptions with a 
string of men in tow " like a graceful ship in 
full sail with several tuofs steaming in her wake." 
This determination on the part of the public 
to see in purely fictitious women an actual one 
is a little hard on the supposed " model," and 
those novelists whose characters are the crea- 
tures of their brain. 

To return to the house of Mrs. Sam Wynd- 
ham, Crawford makes a most amusing comment 
relative to its number. " It is a peculiarity of 
Boston to put the number of the houses on the 
back instead of the front, so that the only cer- 
tain course to follow in searching for a friend 
is to reach the rear of his house, by a circuit- 
ous route through side streets and back alleys, 
and then, having fixed the exact position of his 
residence by astronomical observation, to re- 
turn to the front and enquire for him. It is 
true that even then one is frequently mistaken, 
but there is nothino- else to be done." 

Evidently Mrs. Sam Wyndham did not, like 

116 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Mrs. Daintry (James's A New England Win- 
ter), follow the old Boston custom of ornament- 
ing her door with a large silver plate, the 
exhibition of which Mrs. Daintry preferred to 
the more distinguished modern fashion of sup- 
pressing the domiciliary label. The Autocrat 
makes mention of these Beacon Street door 
plates, which in his day were a matter of 
course. 

In the neighbourhood of Mrs. Sam Wynd- 
ham lived Miss Schenectady, at whose house 
we first meet John Harrington, who is the 
American politician which gives the novel its 
title. This Harrington, says his creator, was 
a constant source of interest, and not infre- 
quently of terror, to the good town of Boston. 
" True, he was a Bostonian himself, a chip of 
the old block, whose progenitors had lived in 
Salem, and whose very name breathed Pilgrim 
memories. He even had a tea-pot that had 
come over in the Mayflower. This was greatly 
venerated, and whenever John Harrington said 
anything more than usually modern his friends 

117 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

brandished the tea-pot, morally speaking, in 
his defense, and put it in the clouds as a kind 
of rainbow — a promise that Puritan blood 
could not go wrong. Nevertheless, Harring- 
ton continued to startle his fellow-townsmen 
by his writings and sayings, so that many of 
the grave sort shook their heads and swore 
that he sympathized with the Irish and be- 
lieved in Chinese labor." 

Beacon Street was the locality in which lived 
Bayard's uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester (Miss 
Phelps's A Singular Life), though the author 
says she had, and never does have, for the 
homes of her characters any particular houses 
in mind. Bayard, she has told us in her Chap- 
ter From a. Life, is her dearest hero. 

The house of most interest as we stroll down 
the water side of Beacon Street is No. 296, 
once the home of the Autocrat and now of 
his son Judge Holmes. Mr. Howells, for three 
years his near neighbour,opens the door for us 
in a charming fashion {Literary Friends and 
Acquaintance), and having conducted us to 

118 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the library, shows us the view from the win- 
dow as the Autocrat saw and loved it. " He 
said that you could count fourteen towns and 
villages in the compass of that view, with the 
three conspicuous monuments accenting the 
different attractions of it : the tower of Me- 
morial Hall at Harvard ; the obelisk on Bun- 
ker Bill ; and in the centre of the picture that 
bulk of Tufts College which he said he ex- 
pected to greet his eyes the first thing when 
he opened them in the other world. But the 
prospect, though generally the same, had cer- 
tain precious differences for each of us, which 
I have no doubt he valued himself as much 
upon as I did. I have a notion that he fan- 
cied these were to be enjoyed best in his 
library through two oval panes let into the bay 
there apart from the windows, for he was apt 
to make you come and look out of them if you 
got to talking of the view before you left. 

In this pleasant study he lived among the 
books, which seemed to multiply from case to 
case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to 

119 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, 
and the desk where he wrote was as scrupu- 




- 



296 BEACON STREET (THE OVAL DOORWAY), THE 

HOME OF " THE AUTOCRAT " 

302, THE HOME OF MR. HOWEl I - 

"When you come to the Back Bar, give me the 
water side of Beacon Street." — ffowells's "The Rise 
of Silas Lap ham." 

lously neat as if the sloven disarray of most 
authors' desks were impossible to him. He 
had a number of ingrenious little contrivances 






IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

for helping his work, which he liked to show 
you ; for a time a revolving bookcase at the 
corner of his desk seemed to be his pet ; and 
after that came his fountain pen, which he used 
with due observance of its fountain principle, 
though he was tolerant of me when I said I 
always dipped mine in the inkstand ; it was a 
merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in any- 
wise. After you had gone over these objects 
with him, and perhaps taken a peep at some- 
thing he was examining through his micro- 
scope, he sat down at one corner of his hearth, 
and invited you to an easy chair at the other." 

At No. 302, just below the Autocrats, is the 
house occupied by Mr. Howells, in the library 
of which he wrote much of his later Boston 
fiction. He had this block in mind in describ- 
ing the home of Miss Kingsbury (A Woman's 
Reason), and also the site of the ill-fated man- 
sion of Col. Lapham {The Rise of Silas Lap- 
ham). " When you come to the Back Bay," 
said the Colonel to young Corey while showing 
him over the house, "give me the water side 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

of Beacon Street. . . . The Bay spreads its 
glassy sheet before them, empty but for a few- 
small boats and a large schooner, with her sails 
close-furled and dripping like snow from her 
spars, which a tug was rapidly towing toward 




" Marlborough, a straight, long street with 
houses just alike." — ffowells's " The Minister's 
Charged 



Cambridge. The carpentry of that city, em- 
banked and embowered in foliage, shared the 
picturesqueness of Charlestown in the dis- 
tance." 

Parallel to and one block south of Beacon 
Street is Marlborough, " a straight, long street, 
with houses just alike on both sides and bits 
of grass before them," called by Mr. Howells. 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Bolingbrook in describing it as the street in 
which lived the Rev. Mr. Sewell, whom the 
novelist has intimately involved in the affairs 
of Silas Lapham and in The Minister s Charge. 




" — theyneared Mrs. Rangeley's house on Marl- 
borough Street." — Arlo Bates's " The Puri- 
tans." 



Half a block away lived Miss Vane, of the lat- 
ter novel, and somewhere in this street lived 
Mrs. Rangeley (Bates's The Puritans), where 
so much that was eventful happened to Mau- 
rice Wynne. 

At No. 459 Marlborough Street is the town 
house of Mr. J. F. Stimson, the novelist and 

123 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



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The home of the Maxwells on 
the " sunny side " of Common- 
wealth Avenue. — Eliza Orne 
White s "Miss Brooks" 



author of Pirate 
Gold, the characters 
of which are old 
friends, many of 
whose haunts and 
homes we have dis- 
covered in our ram- 
bles. 

Commonwealth 
Avenue, or in the 
vernacular, "the Ave- 
nue," with its beauti- 
ful park through the centre, is next in impor- 
tance to Beacon Street in the pages of Boston 
fiction. We know that the Maxwells (Miss 
Brooks) lived there, as did the Rowans and Dr. 
McDowell (The Sentimentalists*) ; so, too, did 
the Chauncey Wilsons (The Puritans), Mrs. 
Wiley {Truth Dexte?-), we suspect, and the 
inconsequent Grangers (Her Boston Experi- 
ences) were quite content with it when they 
might have lived in Beacon Street ! 

All these persons being fashionables, lived 
124 




BOSTON 

on " the sunny side " 
— the Maxwells be- 
tween Arlington and 
Berkeley Streets, in 
a beautiful vine-cov- 
ered house, while be- 
low them is the gray 
stone dwelling of the 
Rowans — the girl, 
' u /u W ., J but not her brother, 

The home of the Chauncey \\ ll- 

sons— at the corner of Common- Qne Q r t ] le mos t pro- 
wealth Avenue and Hereford Street. l 

—Arlo Bates's " The Puritans." nOUHCed of TkcScilti- 

mentalists. Indeed, her temperament is re- 
sponsible for the fact that the title of Mr. Pier's 
novel is plural rather than singular. It was 
orio-inallv his intention to build this story 
mainly around his hero, Vernon Kent, but 
Frances Rowan developed such an excess of 
sentimentality, and Mrs. Kent became so in- 
sistent that a change of title was necessary. 
In Mrs. Kent we have a case of a character 
dominating her creator. She was intended 
to play a clever second to her son, instead 

125 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



of which she showed a decided preference 
for the centre of the stage, which she kept 
with such persistence that Mr. Pier was 
forced to let her take things into her own 
hands, as a result of which she is one of the 



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most interesting women 
to-day in Boston fiction. 
At the corner of the 
Avenue and Hereford 
Street we find the im- 
posing house described 
by Mr. Bates in The< 
Puritans as the home of 
the Chauncey Wilsons. 

THK AVENUE THROUGH THE ^Jfl ll\Q pTOpeT SlCie OI 

the Avenue with a regal 

" Mrs. Daintry was very fond 

of this beautiful prospect."— front of marble and with 

James's "A New England win- 
ter:' balconies of wrought 

iron before the wide windows above, one of es- 
pecially elaborate workmanship having once 
adorned the front of the palace of the Tuileries. 
Pillars of verd antique stood on either side of the 
doorway, as if it were the portal of a temple." 
« 126 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Turninof now to stroll down the Avenue 
through the park, we come upon the much dis- 
cussed and much despised statues of states- 
men — one for every block, to which Virginia 




THE ST. BOTOLPH CLUB NO. 2 NEWBURY 



Kent calls Ballington's attention. Mr. Bates's 
characters in The Philistines were greatly agi- 
tated over plans for a new statue, about which 
they had conflicting and most violent opinions, 
which leads the author to say: "The inner 
history of the effigies which in Boston do duty 
as statues would be most interesting reading, 

127 



FICTIONAL RAMBL) - 

amusing or depressing as ged to 

take it. To know what causes led to the pro- 




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duction and then to the erection of these mon- 
strosities could hardly fail to be instructive, 
although the knowledge might be rather 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

dreary." The Autocrat, too, enters his protest 
when he tells us that he and his fellow-citizens 
have had their sensibilities greatly worked 
upon, their patriotism chilled and their local 
pride outraged by the monstrosities which had 
been allowed to deform their beautiful public 
grounds. 

From the avenue turning into Berkeley and 
thence into Newbury Street, we find at Num- 
ber 2 the St. Botolph Club, where Watson 
and Willis (Aldrich's Goliath) used to play bil- 
liards, and members of which were Craighead 
and Norton ( TrutJi Dexter). But it becomes 
better known to us through the pages of Mr. 
Bates's fiction, notably The Pagans — who 
were all members — and The Philistines, in 
both of which novels it figures under the dis- 
guise of the St. Filipe Club — "which for 
more than a quarter of a century had main- 
tained the reputation of leading in matters of 
art and literature." 

Farther down in the same street lived Mrs. 
Daintry (James's A New England Winter), 

131 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

and around the corner from her in Clarendon 
Street, her daughter Joanna and her six chil- 
dren ; but Clarendon Street is of greater fic- 
tional interest than this, for at the corner of 
Newbury we come upon the home of the Rev. 
Mr. Strathmore [The Puritans), a house 
known through the country as the home of the 
great Bishop Brooks. If it was not Mr. 
Bates's intention to draw Mr. Strathmore 
from the celebrated bishop, he has, neverthe- 
less, unconsciously done it with so sympathetic 
a touch that it is impossible not to recall him 
in every line. "Strathmore was of commanding 
presence ... a man who appealed strongly to 
the common heart, both by his sympathy and 
by flexibility of character and temperament, 
which made it impossible for him to be repel- 
lently stern or austere. He preached high 
ideals ... he demanded high purpose and high 
life, noble aims and unfailing charity ... he was 
looked up to by the general public as a great 
spiritual leader, and loved with an affection 
exceedingly rare in this unpriestly age." 

132 




" The lovely day became a still lovelier day within, enriched by 
the dyes of the stained windows through which it streamed." — 
Howells 's "April Hopes." 



133 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Adjacent to this low vine-covered house is 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
where Susan ( E. E. Hale's Susans Escort) 
attended lectures and from which were gradu- 
ated the young men in Miss Reed's Miss 
Theodora. From the corner where we are 
standing stretches out to the right of us 
Copley Square, which, with its beautiful Trinity 
Church, Art Museum, Public Library and New 
Old South Church, combine, says Margaret 
Alston, to form the most interesting Square 
architecturally in America. Trinity, with its 
great domed interior, harmonious tones, and 
peaceful sanctity, called to her mind the char- 
acter of the man who had unconsciously built 
the glory of this edifice. 

Here the consecration of Mr. Strathmore 
{The Puritans) took place on a "beautiful 
June day, and was as imposing a function in 
its line as Boston had ever seen. Trinity was 
crowded to over-flowing, and if the ceremonv 
was less imposing than would have been the 
induction of a Catholic bishop, it was impres- 
ts 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

sive and dignified. The sunlight filtering 
through the windows of stained glass splashed 
fantastic colours over the long surpliced train 
which wound through the aisles down to the 
chancel, singing processionals of joyous hope ; 
the air was full of the sense of solemn meaning ; 
the organ pealed ; the noble words of the fine 
old ritual spoke to the hearts of the hearers, 
and carried their message of a faith which took 
hold upon the unseen. Above all the circum- 
stance, the form, the conventions, the creeds, 
rose the spirit of the worshipers, uplifted by 
the thrilling realization of the outpouring of 
the soul of humanity before the unknown 
Eternal." 

Miss Theodora's Earnest attended service 
here Sunday afternoons content to stand for 
an hour in the crowded aisle to hear the up- 
lifting word of the great preacher, while 
Howells gives us a picture of its interior 
when his hero and heroine of April Hopes 
are finally married there. 

These two young people, earlier in the 
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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

novel had a chance encounter at the Museum 
of Fine Arts near by, a place also identified 
with the Bartley Hubbards (A Modern In- 
stance), who, sometimes, going there in their 
early Boston days, " found a pleasure in the 




" How strange that we should meet at the 
Museum." — Howells" s "April Hopes." 



worst things which the best never afterward 
eave them." The conventional Edith Cald- 
well is persuaded by her fiance, Fenton, — 
that Pagan of The Pagans, to sit awhile in the 
picture gallery of the Art Museum while he 
assures her they are in no danger of being 
seen doing anything so unconventional, for 

139 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the Museum "is the most solitary place in the 
city. 

The new Public Library, the crowning 
possession of Boston, plays a conspicuous 
part in Her Boston Experiences, for there in 
Bates Hall occurred the incident on which the 
romance of the story is built. Truth Dexter, 
in her bewildering attempt to digest Boston 
came frequently to the Library where, we are 
told, Sargent's celebrated decorations affected 
her strangely. " I don't ever expect to know 
what it all means," she said earnestly. " Per- 
haps that's why I never get tired of studying it. 
All that chaotic mystery of wings and lions, 
and shadowy creatures makes you try to re- 
member something that must have been a<Jes 
and ages ago, and just when your heart 
aches so that it seems about to burst and 
spill out the secret, then the old prophets 
step out from their places, and tell you that 
there is no use trying. I can't keep away 
from it." 

Studious Mr. Jenks (Sawyer's A Local 
140 




" — the latter-day edition of the historic Old South Church. 
Margaret Alls ton's "Her Boston Experiences." 



141 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Habitation) generally put in his Sundays at 
the Library, which this fictitious individual 
could only do to-day sub rosa, for the novel 
of which he forms a part has been debarred 
from its shelves. 

Across from the Library is the " latter-day 
edition of the historic Old South Church, 
whose congregation, after several removals, 
has settled in New Boston, a long distance 
from the original site of the church." A 
block farther on at the corner of Dartmouth 
and Newbury streets we find the Art Club 
where the heroine of Her Boston Experi- 
ences was taken to an annual exhibition which 
" seemed to be but a social gathering decor- 
ated by the pictures on the walls." 

Returning past the church and down Boyl- 
ston street a block to Exeter, we come upon 
the new hotel, which we imagine is the house 
described as The Hanover where Craighead 
brought his bride {Truth Dexter) and en- 
deavored to initiate her into the mysteries of 
modern apartment house life. 

143 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

VII. THE SOUTH END 

WITH the exception of Mr. Howells, 
and more recently Walter Leon 
Sawyer, few novelists have found 
inspiration in that — from the Back Bay point 
of view — "impossible" section of the town 
known as the South End. Mr. Bates felt the 
outskirts of it to be a suitable abiding place 
for the equally "impossible" Mrs. Amanda 
Welsh Sampson (The Philistines), who 
lived "at the top of a speaking tube in 
one of those apartment hotels which stand 
upon the debatable ground between the select 
region of the Back Bay and the scorned pre- 
cincts of the South End." This, we suspect, 
is Huntington Avenue, a street of Notting- 
ham lace curtains, carefully draped back to 
show the Rogers Groups on neat marble 
stands. In this street also lived Mr. David 
Willis (Aldrich's Goliali), and the same de- 
batable ground became the home, after Mrs. 
Kent's death (The Sentimentalists), of Ver- 
non and his sister. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney 

144 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

in her novel Hitherto calls the South End a 
piece of New York patched on, while a 




< 



CONCORD SQUARE 

" He had not built, but had bought very 
cheap of a terrified gentleman of good extrac- 
tion, who discovered too late that the South End 
was not the thing. " — Howell? s ''The Rise oj 
Silas Lapham." 

" The bit of Virginia creeper planted under 
the window hung shrivelled upon its trellis." — 
"Their Wedding Journey." 

younger novelist, in referring to this locality, 
says it was laid out after the manner of New 
York in an unsuccessful attempt to turn the 
tide of fashion away from Beacon Street. 

145 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

But because it was unfashionable, it exactly 
suited Colonel Lapham {The Rise of Silas 
Lapham) in the socially unambitious stage of 
his career. " He had not built, but had 
bought very cheap of a terrified gentleman 
of good extraction, who discovered too late 
that the South End was not the thing, and 
who in the eaeerness of his flight to the Back 
Bay threw in his carpets and shades for al- 
most nothing." This locality in the novel 
Mr. Howells calls Nankeen Square, but the 
actual place he had in mind is Concord 
Square, where the trees in the pretty oval 
make as charming an autumnal display as in 
the days when Penelope Lapham admired 
them. Here also is the home of the Marches 
{Their Wedding Journey) with its bit of 
Virginia creeper still growing over the win- 
dow as the novelist describes. 

Harrison Avenue, "a queer, melancholy 

street, which, without having yet accomplished 

its destiny as a business thoroughfare, is no 

loneer the home of decorous ease," was where 

, 146 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the Pythoness lived with her father Dr. Boyn- 
ton (Howell's An Undiscovered Country). 
This avenue is called by Mr. Howells Pleas- 
ant in The Minister s Charge. 

Mr. Henry James also had it in mind in 
describing the home of Miss Birdseye {The 
Bostonians) who lived in a row of red houses 
with protuberant fronts, approached by ladders 
of stone. Her mansion " had a salient front, 
an enormous and very high number — 756 — 
painted in gilt on the glass light above the 
door, a tin sign bearing the name of a 
doctress suspended from one of the windows 
of the basement and a peculiar look of be- 
ing both new and faded — a kind of modern 
fatigue, like certain articles of commerce 
which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn." 
Here Basil was taken by Olive to that extra- 
ordinary meeting made memorable to him 
by the presence of Verena Tarrent. While 
Miss Birdseye — "the whole moral history 
of Boston was reflected in her displaced 
spectacles " — was herself a revelation to the 

147 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

southern man plunged so unexpectedly into 
Olive's set. 

We are given to understand that as a 
typical Bostonian Olive Chancellor could not 
fail to belong to a "set." She had a pref- 
erence for what she called real people and there 
were several whose reality she had tested by 
arts known to herself. This little society was 
rather suburban than miscellaneous ; it was 
prolific in ladies who trotted about early and 
late, with books from the Athenaeum nursed 
behind their muffs, or little nosegays of ex- 
quisite flowers that they were carrying as pres- 
ents to each other — they were always appar- 
ently straining a little, as if they might be too 
late for something." 

Near Harrison Avenue is upper Washington 
Street the scene of A Local Habitation. "Now 
that it has ceased to be a region of homes, all 
one can say of that portion of Washington 
Street which lies between Waltham and North- 
ampton streets is that it will — sometime — be 
a part of the business section. In the course 
/ 148 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

of transition it has already passed that initial 
stage in which every other basement an- 
nounces ' Table Board.' It is now the field on 
which is continually re-enacted the Tragedy of 
the Small Shop. . . . It seemed to Carter that 
with the exception of the saloon, which was 
quite at home, all the shops wore a certain air 
of discouraged effort. Evidently the people 
who lived near them were studious of bargains 
— which they sought elsewhere." 

In this novel Mr. Sawyer has given us a 
sympathetic study of a South End lodg- 
ing house — a form of realism in which 
Mr. Howells is pre-eminent. " I can conceive," 
the author makes one of the lodgers say, " that 
a novelist might study the hearts and lives of 
these South-Enders, and then display them to 
the shame of more fortunate folk. He could 
tell of the faithful toil, the unremitting self-de- 
nial, by which so many families are held 
together in homes that are really homes, though 
they stand mid-way the pawnshop and the 
poorhouse. . . . He would show how the poor 

149 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

help the poorer, how men maintain their hon- 
esty and women their chastity though pressed 
by bitter temptation ; how the worst tenement 
in the meanest street may shelter people who 
are thoughtful and generous and kind." 

Mrs. Keats Bradford in Miss Pool's novel of 
that name once stopped in a quiet hotel in the 
South End where she was as much by herself 
as if she were in a foreign town. This was, 
perhaps, the Commonwealth Hotel, at the west 
end of Worcester Square — a square in which 
we linger because it became the home of dear 
old Jamie McMurtagh {Pirate Gold) when, at 
the time of the marriage of Mercedes to St. 
Clair, he sold the house in Salem Street. The 
St. Clairs lived with him in this new and pleas- 
ant place, where there was a little park with 
trees in front, and the novelist tells us that it 
delighted the unselfish old Jamie to let St. 
Clair away early from the bank and to remain 
himself alone over the ledgers, imagining St. 
Clair hurrying home, and the greeting kiss, 
and the walk they got along the shells of the 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

beach before supper, with the setting sun slant- 
ing to them over the wide bay from the Brook- 
line hills. 

Columbus Avenue, one of the most promi- 
nent of the South End streets, is the locality 
to which the Kents moved from Beacon Hill 
and is graphically described by Mr. Pier in 
The Sentimentalists. "In this region," he says, 
" the streets are flat, treeless ashpalted wastes, 
lined with brick shells, in most of which the 
vestibules bear a perferation of electric but- 
tons and suggest the but recently abated pres- 
ence of a slovenly scrub-woman. The window- 
curtains are uniformly of frowsy lace ; there 
are at intervals little bakeries and restaurants, 
all of which have lace curtains. . . . The dis- 
trict is peopled largely with those who board ; 
with students in schools of oratory and ex- 
pression, music students, art students, seams- 
tresses and shop-girls. The apartment-houses 
are tenanted by different classes ; by hard- 
working artisans and their families, by quacks, 
by persons who range from the acme of the 

151 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

commonplace to the abominable of Bohemia, 
and by clerks and professional men, whose 
ambition has faded, year by year, yet who, in 







28 RUTLAND SQUARE THE HOME OF MRS. 

LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON 

"London was in the air at this house. "— 
Margaret Allstons "Her Boston Experiences. 



their humble surroundings, rear their children 
with all the watchful love and eager hope of 
those more fortunate brethren whose poor 
hacks they are." 

152 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Running off this avenue, another novel- 
ist tells us are the most interesting domestic 
squares in Boston, and in one of them, in 
Number 28 Rutland Square, we find the home 
of that charming poet and author, Mrs. Louise 
Chandler Moulton, who, we are informed by 
the heroine of Her Boston Experiences, never 
makes calls, but receives in salon fashion once 
a week. London was in the air at this house 
where Margaret Alston spent her most inter- 
esting half-hour, sociallv, in Boston. 



153 



IN OLD BOSTON 



TT 



I. ABOUT THE WHARVES 

HE fictional rambler who strolls down 
among' the wharves at the lower end 
of the old part of the city will find 
stretched out a vista of romance from the 
days of the departure and return, in 1 745 of 
the Louisburg heroes of which Bynner writes 
in Agnes Surriage, to the stirring old East 
India days in the first half of the last century 
of which Mr. Ho wells in A Woman's Reason 
and Mr. Stimson in Pirate Gold tell so sym- 
pathetically. 

Aofnes Surriaee " the maid of Marblehead " 
during her first months in Boston loved to 
frequent these docks where the bustling fa- 
miliar scene brought back to her the associa- 
tions of her fisher home ; and there she fled, 

157 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

turning as if by natural instinct to the sea 
when smarting under the humiliation of Frank- 
land's compromising proposal. Hers was, as 
Holmes says, 

" The old, old story— fair, arid young, 
And fond, — and not too wise, — 
That matrons tell, with sharpened tongue, 
To maids with downcast eyes." 

and so closely does the novel follow the facts 
of her remarkable and actual career that it is 
difficult to tell where truth leaves off and fiction 
begins. Bynner gives us one of his many 
pictures of her in this locality on Long Wharf 
at the foot of State Street. 

Here where commercial trafic jostles the 
elbow we will continue our rambles, lingering 
to conjure up in imagination that memorable 
day as described by the novelist when the re- 
turn of the Louisburg expedition set the town 
agog. 

Aofnes — having" harkened to the voice of 
the tempter — was then living with Frankland, 
the dashing young Collector, but had not per- 

158 




I remember the black wharves and the slips 

And the sea-tides tossing free ; 
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships ; 
And the magic of the sea. 

— Longfellow's "Lost Youth. 



*59 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

mitted herself to appear in public until that 
day when, roused by the excitement of the 
occasion and yielding to his entreaties, she 
consented to drive with him to King, now 
State Street, where the fine equipage took its 
place in the great throng of vehicles on the 
way down to Long Wharf to help Warren 
and Pepperel ashore. " Boston," says Bynner, 
" had known few such opportunities for a 
pageant. Nature, too, conspired to the suc- 
cess of the occasion by making that first of 
June a radiant day. The whole populace 
came forth to celebrate their first oreat mili- 
tary achievement, now renowned throughout 
the world." Poor Agnes, embarrassed by the 
stares of the curious took no pleasure in the 
excitement, but the Collector's blood was fired 
and they remained in the crowd at the wharf 
until the heroes had landed and marched, 
followed by the shouting populace to the Town 
House. 

This Long Wharf has played a particularly 
conspicuous part in Boston fiction. Histori- 

161 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

cally it was the scene of so many stirring 
events that it is small wonder the romancer 
has spun his delicate web about it. There 
Cooper's Lionel Lincoln landed from England 
on an early April morning in 1775, and a 
dreary place he appears to have found it. 
The wharves were naked, Cooper tells us. 
" A few neglected and dismantled ships were 
lying at different points ; but the hum of busi- 
ness, the forests of masts, and the rattling of 
wheels which at that early hour should have 
distinguished the o-reat mart of the colonies, 
were wanting. In their places were to be 
heard at "intervals, the sudden burst of distant 
martial music, the riotous merriment of the 
soldiery who frequented the taverns at the 
water's edge, or the sullen challenges of the 
sentinels from the vessels of war, as they vexed 
the progress of the few boats which the inhab- 
itants still used in their ordinary pursuits." 

At thiswharf a year later were the boats which 
carried many of the British troops to Breed's 
Hill, among them "Wolfe's own" of which 

162 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Lionel Lincoln was the Major, left behind on 
that memorable day, Cooper explains, because 
Gage saw fit to fill his place with another and, 
he said, a less important man. A brilliant 
scene was the departure of the over-confident 
troops whose officers thought it was to be 
merely an affair of out-posts. The following 
year when the royal army was rapidly retiring, 
Sir Lionel Lincoln, baronet by the recent 
death of his father, embarked in a small boat 
from Lonor Wharf for the British frigate 
which carried him and his pretty kinswoman, 
Cecil Dynevor, whom he had married, back 
to England and their baronial estates. 

At the head of Long Wharf old Deacon 
Shem Drowne, who is not a fictitious person, 
but has been immortalized by Hawthorne in 
his Mosses From an Old Manse, had his shop 
just at the water's edge. This was when 
the water's edge meant where the Custom 
House is now standing. Hawthorne tells 
us that men of taste about the wharf were 
wont to show their love for the arts by fre- 

163 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 




M Mf 



THE INSPIRATION OF A BIT OF 
HAWTHORNE ALLEGORY 



quent visits to Drowne's 
workshop where his 
wooden images excited 
not only their admira- 
tion but that of 
Copley, the artist, 
who was an occa- 
sional visitor. 
Here came the jo- 
vial Captain Hun- 
newell to order for 
his Cynosure — 
"the sweetest craft 
that ever floated," 
such a figurehead 
as old Neptune 
never saw in his 
life. The Captain 
had his own ideas 
about this ima<re 
which touched 
Drowne with such 
inspiration that he 



164 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

produced a masterpiece the like of which 
the good old town had never seen carved 
from an oaken log. An exquisite female 
figure it was, endowed with such natural- 
ness that on first seeing it persons felt im- 
pelled to remove their hats and pay such rev- 
erence as was due to the richly dressed and 
beautiful young lady who actually seemed to 
stand in a corner of the room with oaken chips 
and shavings scattered at her feet. Haw- 
thorne further gives his imagination full play 
in picturing Drowne a modern Pygmalion dis- 
covered by his townsmen kneeling at the feet 
of the oaken ladv while eazincr with a lover's 
passionate ardor into the face his own hands 
had created. 

The Cynosure with its remarkable figure 
head has sailed into oblivion, but a reduced 
likeness of its jovial Captain is preserved for 
us in the Shem Drowne figure of Admiral 
Vernon, finished shortly after the Cynosure 
sailed. This imaee never took its rightful 
place on the prow of a vessel but became the 

165 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

picturesque sign at the doorway of a shop at 
the head of Long Wharf, where since 1770 it 
has stolidly gazed at the passer by, to be re- 
moved within a few months to a window in 
Central Street, nearby. 

The quaint little man holding a telescope 
and quadrant does not present a very jovial 
aspect, but he is stylishly dressed in the cos- 
tume of the period as Hawthorne describes. 
The paint is somewhat worn from his gayly- 
coloured clothes, but he presents a dignified ap- 
pearance and commands respect from the 
passer-by as the inspiration of a bit of Haw- 
thorne allegory. It is easy to imagine that the 
romancer liked to linger about the old shop of 
which the Admiral Vernon sign formed a part, 
for, situated at that time at the corner of State 
and Broad streets in a block recently torn 
down, it was a veritable antiquity with its quaint 
nautical instrument business established in 
1770 when State was King Street. One won- 
ders if Dickens did not stroll in there during 
his Boston visit and find in the image a sug- 

166 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 



gestion for the little figure displayed by 
Walter's uncle in Domby and Son. 

Since 1720 there has been standing on Long 
Wharf the Salt House, of literary interest as 
being the place where Hawthorne wrote the 
Scarlet Letter. He used 
a little back room on 
the top floor which, we 
are told, had the only 
window in the upper 
story that looked out 
on T wharf, and the 
ceiling was so low that, 
on entering, a tall man 
with a high hat had to 
stoop. It is probable 
that the romancer did 
not find this fact at all 
disturbing. The room which underwent the 
usual chancres when some years aeo the build- 
ing was remodeled is now occupied by pros- 
perous fish merchants. That classic shades 
hover over their prosaic offices is unsuspected 

167 




IHE OLD SALT HOUSE, WHERE 

HAWTHORNE WROTE "THE 

SCARLET LETTER " 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

by the present occupants, one of the oldest of 
whom when told recently that Hawthorne was 
identified with the place, said he guessed not, 
there'd been no such person in the business in 
his time and he'd known the Salt House in 
and out for sixty years ! 

Captain Moore Carew, the hero of F. J. 
Stimson's King Noanett, in search of work 
tries the counting rooms of Long Wharf to be 
refused by one prim old gentleman after an- 
other. And from the same wharf in search of 
further adventures he later set sail for the 
Barbadoes. In his Two Years Before the 
Mast Richard Henry Dana, junior, writes sym- 
pathetically of approaching the wharves on his 
return voyage and the joy of hearing, floating 
out to him across the water, the bells of the 
Old South. 

A few steps south of Long is India Wharf, 
during the first half of the last century as 
crowded with commercial interest as were 
its warehouses with the spices of the 
East. A counting room there was more than 

168 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

a badge of respectability, it marked its owner 
as an aristocrat. At the head of India Wharf, 
two flights up in an old granite building, was 
the counting room of James Bowdoin's Sons 
which is the scene of much of the story of 
Pirate Gold. Mr. Stimson calls it India 
Wharf in his novel, but the actual counting 
room which he had in mind was that of Mr. 
Josiah Bradlee, a famous old Boston mer- 
chant, whose warehouses are standing to-day 
on Central Wharf, which lies next to India. 
A style of office now extinct was Mr. James 
Bowdoin's : "The floor of the room was bare. 
Between the windows on one side, was an 
open empty stove ; on the other were two 
high desks, with stools. An eight-day clock 
ticked comfortably on the wall, and on either 
side of it were two pictures, wood-cuts, eked out 
with rude splashes of red and blue by some 
primitive process of lithography ; the one 
represented ' The Take of a Right Whale 
in Behring's Sea by the Good Adventure 
Barque out of New Bedford ;' and the other 

169 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the ' Landing of His Majesty's Troops in 
Boston, His Majesty's province of Massa- 
chusetts Bay in New England, 1766.' There 
was not a sea on earth, probably that did not 
bear its boundary ship sent out from that 
small office. And if it was still in there, it 
had a cosmopolitan, aromatic smell ; for every 
strange letter or foreign sample with which 
the place was littered bespoke the business of 
the bright, blue world outside." 

Strolling into the old granite building at 
the head of Central Wharf and climbing up 
the stairway to-day, one expects to overtake 
the infuriated Mr. James Bowdoin going up 
through the cloud of aromatic dust, which his 
fun-loving son, literally following certain pre- 
emptory orders, had made by sweeping stairs 
unswept for years. It is interesting to know 
that the delightful eccentricities of the lovable 
Mr. James Bowdoin existed in his prototype, 
Mr. josiah Bradlee, who is well remembered 
by present-day Bostonians. 

The romantic side of the trade of the Orient 
170 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

is graphically described in A Woman s Rea- 
son, by Howells, who places the counting-room 
of the father of the heroine on India wharf. 
Harkness was one of the last of the East India 
merchants, and Captain Butler said it made one 
think of the ancient regime to look at him. The 
two men reminisced one day in Mr. Harkness's 
library over the departed glories of what they 
called the grandest commerce in the world — 
with Helen Harkness for an enraptured audi- 
ence. To Helen, India Wharf meant only the 
place "the Nahant boat starts from" and that 
is largely what it means to the younger gen- 
eration to-day. But her father clung to the 
old traditions and so did old Mr. James Bow- 
doin, who, in spite of the great changes in the 
business which he lived to see, never failed to 
get very early to the little counting-room as in 
the days when he might hope to find some 
ship of his own, fresh from the Orient, warp- 
ing- into the dock. 

The wharves in the times just following the 
Revolution play an important part in Bynner's 

171 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

\ary PJiips for Scarlett's Wharf was a 
favorite haunt of Zach. This wharf no longer 
remains, but it stood in former days at the foot 
of Fleet Street, then called Scarlett's Wharf 
Lane, and Bynner pictures a bustling scene of 
'longshoremen, stevedores, and sailors rolling 
casks, carrvine ba^s and sacks with the usual 
accompaniment of shouting and cursing. Such 
an atmosphere was fascinating to a boy of 
Zach's temperament and it is no astonishment 
to learn that sneaking on to a vessel at the 
edge of the dock, Zach. one day, ran off to 
sea. 

These wharves come into some prominence 
in Holme's The Guardian Angel during the 
search so humorously described, of the two 
vounof men and rivals. Murrav Bradshaw and 
Cyprian Eveleth for the missing Myrtle Haz- 
ard. Murray visited all the wharves, enquir- 
ing on every vessel where it seemed possible 
she miurht have been looking about. On Sun- 
day he learned that M a youth corresponding to 
his description of Myrtle in her probable dis- 






IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

euise had been that morning on board the 
Swordfish — doubtless intending to take pass- 
age in her. The next morning he walked 
down to the wharf, where the Swordfish was 
moored. The ship had left the wharf 
and was lvincr out in the stream. A small 
boat had just reached her, and a slender 
youth, as he appeared at the distance, climbed, 
not over adroitly, up the vessel's side. Mur- 
ray Bradshaw called to a boatman nearby and 
ordered the man to row him over as fast as he 
could to the vessel lying - in the stream. He 
had no sooner reached the deck of the Sword- 
fish than he asked for the young person who 
had just been put on board." Told that 
he was below "his heart beat, in spite of 
his cool temperament, as he went down the 
steps leading to the cabin. The young 
person was talking earnestly to the Cap- 
tain, and. on his turning round, Mr. William 
Murray Bradshaw had the pleasure of rec- 
ognizing his young friend, Mr. Cyprian 
Eveleth !" 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Docks like these of the novelists were Long- 
fellow's : 

black wharves and the slips, 

And the sea-tides tossing free, 
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 

And the magic of the sea. 

Passing northward up Atlantic Avenue which 
skirts the margin of the water, we pause a mo- 
ment before turning into Fleet Street to re- 
member that, where modern ware-houses and 
stores are stretched interminably once stood 
the home of that much loved character in fic- 
tion, Trueman Flint, the hero of Maria Cum- 
mins's The Lamplighter. Two generations 
recall and discuss with a third to-day the for- 
tunes of Gerty, the heroine. This novel be- 
longs to the semi-romantic class of literature, 
but has retained its immense hold on the pub- 
lic because of the noble, endearing qualities of 
the old Lamplighter around whom the elabor- 
ate plot is woven. Undoubtedly he was a 
true character. " Of course," asserted a young 

174 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

admirer, " Wasn't his name Trueman?" Per- 
haps she and Miss Cummins may not have 
had the same interpretation of the hero's name, 
but if he was not "true" at the beginning, true 
he has become to thousands of readers to 
whom the author has made him so convincing. 
Poor as he was, his home, she is very particular 
to tell us, was a decent, two-storied house with 
a small, narrow enclosed yard and a little gate 
close to the sidewalk. True lodged in the 
back of the house and a veritable paradise it 
seemed to Gertie when he took the little waif 
in to " bide " with him. 

The neighbourhood is full of associations 
with this loving and much loved pair, and lin- 
oferine at the water's ed^e one looks about, 
alas ! in vain, for that fascinating wood-yard 
the sanctum of Gerty, where, " out of sight of 
the houses there was an immense pile of tim- 
ber of different lengths and unevenly placed, 
the planks forming on one side a series of 
irregular steps by which it was easy to climb 
up. Near the top was a little sheltered recess 

175 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

overhung by some long planks, and forming a 
miniature shed, protected by the wood on all 
sides but one, and from that looking out upon 
the water. To escape from the old shrew, 
Nan Grant with whom she lived, and spend 
hours in this retreat watching the lively sailors 
at work, was all the happiness little Gerty knew 
until she was taken into the home of the 
Lamplighter. 

II. THE HEART OF THE OLD 
NORTH END 

OF the Old North End, as the novelists 
have depicted it, there is to-day more 
trace than the casual reader or rambler 
would fancy. History and romance are de- 
lightfully interwoven in much of the fiction 
which treats of this section of the town. 
Leaving Atlantic Avenue and the wharves it 
is interesting to turn up old Fleet Street — so 
named when it grew from Scarlett's Wharf 
Lane to the dignity of a street in 1 708, and 
give oneself up to the world of Cooper, Byn- 

176 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ner, Hawthorne, Stimson and Lydia Maria 
Child, whose semi-historical characters, to the 
imaginative, people the crooked old streets 
swarming in reality with the mixed foreign 
element which pervades the North End. 
These writers saturated themselves with the 
atmosphere of the town, which was the more 
easy for Cooper, perhaps, for in 1824 when he 
came on to Boston and prowled around the 
North End to get his local colour for Lionel 
Lincoln, many of the landmarks were standing, 
notably the Sir Henry Frankland House 
which he describes as Mrs. Lechmeres's in the 
novel, and where, tradition has it, he stayed 
while collecting his material. 

This locality in Colonial days held the Bos- 
ton world of wealth and fashion, and we do 
not go far up Fleet Street before coming to 
little Garden Court Street, now a block of 
shabby brick houses, but in former days the 
mansions of Sir Harry Frankland and Gov- 
ernor Hutchinson, side by side, occupied the 
entire square from Fleet to Prince Streets. 

177 



•• S -. . it A I 

7 - - : • -; >:t : a- < ■ . ; - as Frit ;-:". J;-.:r: 

inson mansion ts gardens ^ back 




. - — 

■ - 

to Fleet and Hanover Streets s given 
Child in The Rebels. The large brick house 
was ornamented in front with four Corinthian 
Ti- inters and the r. - iat when the 

Lieutenant-Governors young; nephew, Captain 
Somerville arrived from England, he 

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off Ezrr- ' 

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: 7i_i." : " t ~ti ic.rc iv :-:"-"" : " ~ - 

----■"" 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

tounded quests. More thrilling things than 
these happened in the library of the house on 
a night early in the story when the Governor 
and Dr. Byles were quietly deciphering a 
manuscript brought over from England by the 
young captain. Take a peep into this room of 
the scholar and the antiquarian and see how 
splendidly it was hung with canvas tapestry, 
" on which was blazoned the coronation of 
George II., here and there interspersed with 
the royal arms. The portraits of Anne 
and the two Georges hung in massive frames 
of antique splendour, and the crowded shelves 
were surmounted with busts of the house of 
Stuart." 

Into this scholarly atmosphere came Somer- 
ville with news of the infuriated state of the 
populace outside, which hardly had he imparted 
when the mob was heard at the doors crying 
vengeance on " stingy Tommy," heartily de- 
tested. The family escaped through the gar- 
den and the mob wreaked its anger on the 
house which half were for burning, but satis- 

180 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

fied themselves by joining the others in ruth- 
lessly destroying the beauty of the interior. 
The library particularly suffered. Books were 
stripped from their covers, manuscripts torn to 
pieces, the royal portraits rent from top to bot- 
tom, and the beautiful swan-like neck of Mary 
Stuart was all that remained of the proud line 
of busts. 

Next door to this mansion stood the scarcely 
less noted one of Sir Harry Frankland, from 
the windows of which the self-imprisoned, un- 
happy Agnes Surriage, in fact as well as in fic- 
tion (Bynners Agues Surriage), wistfully gazed 
down upon those haughty dames who passed 
her by. Plain to severity was the exterior of 
Collector Frankland's house, but this, the novel- 
ist assures us, was merely an architectural mask 
— a Puritanical cloak, as it were, covering the 
swashing bravery of a Royalist and courtier. 
A buffet groaning with massive plate and a 
cellar stocked with choicest wines were not the 
least of the ornaments of a luxurious house, the 
errand staircase of which was so broad and 

181 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

easy of ascent that Frankland used to ride his 
pony up and down. Like a body reft of its 
soul Agnes sat amid the splendour of her new 




" Plain to severity was the exterior of the collec- 
tor's house, but this was merely an architectural 
mask, a Puritanical cloak, as it were, covering the 
swashing bravery of a Royalist and courtier." — 
By niter's "Agues Surriage" 



home, and departed from it with thankfulness 
when eventually they took up their residence 
at Hopkinton. 

Using this Frankland house, which he places 
in Tremont Street, as the abode of the aristo- 

182 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 



cratic Mrs. Lechmere, the aunt of Lionel Lin- 
coln, Cooper describes it at length as the most 
splendid in the town. He permits his hero to 
dwell there for some time as the guest of his 
aunt and young cousins, one of whom he mar- 
ries while the other, 
Agnes Dan forth, marry- 
ing an American officer, 
continues to live in the 
old house after her 
great-aunt's death. 

Garden Court Street 
leads directly into 
North Square, always 
a triangle, where on the 
north side stands to- 
day the house of Paul 
Revere from which he 
started on that famous ride which Long- 
fellow has made immortal. The little frame 
house is not imposing, having sunk to the 
level of an Italian shop and tenement, but 
it is interesting to the rambler as being" 

183 




THE IK 'ME OF PAUL 
REVERE 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

one of the few old North End houses re- 
maining. 

Turn east and pass out North Square 
through Moon, which is just below Garden 
Court Street. Hereon the east side, halfway 
between the Square and Fleet Street, Sir 
Harry Frankland had as his neighbour the 
witty Rev. Samuel Mather, with whom he 
loved to parley. Bynner (Agnes Surriage) de- 
scribes their meeting one evening in Moon 
Street, when the eccentric parson urged him 
to come to prayer meeting, promising to make 
him a special subject of supplication in return 
for the box of lemons the Collector had sent 
him. To which Frankland makes reply that 
he had ample payment in the clever verses re- 
turned. These verses written February 20, 
1757, were as follows : — 

You know from Eastern India came 
The skill of making punch, as did the name; 
And as the name consists of letters five, 
By five ingredients it is kept alive, 
To purest water sugar must be joined 
With these the grateful acid is combined; 
184 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Some any sours they get contented use, 
But men of taste do that from Tagus choose. 
When now these three are mixed with care. 
Then added be of spirit a small share ; 
And that you may the drink quite perfect see, 
Atop the musky nut must grated be. 

From Moon pass into Fleet Street and 
down to North, turning east a block to Clark 
Street where we do not see the present squalor 
but instead conjure up the old " Ship Tavern," 
a famous ordinary to which Bynner's Zachary 
Phips used frequently to be running after 
'baccy for the sailors, and there Mr. James 
(Stimson's Pirate Gold) sometimes took his 
father, Mr. James Bowdoin, for a glass of 
flip. 

A short distance along North Street Salu- 
tation Alley strikes across to Hanover and 
retains one at least of the characteristics fic- 
tion has ascribed to it, for the narrowest street 
in the town it was and is, and in it stood a 
quaint hostelry called Salutation Tavern or 
" The Two Palavers," where Agnes {Agnes 
Surriage) went in search of Job Redden and 

185 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



found him in the tap-room. In her excite- 
ment it is doubtful if she took note of the 
quaint sign-board on which were painted two 
old gossips in the act of greeting, which 
gave the name to both inn and street. 

Farther down the al- 
ley was the home of 
Zach (Zachary Pliips) 
who seldom entered his 
father's home by the 
street door, but pre- 
ferred the rear by way 
of the garden which 
stretched back to Bat- 
tery Street. And here 
Job Pray brought Li- 
" He wended his way to Sal- onel (Cooper's Lionel 

utation Alley." — Bynner's Za- T . f - , , 

chary Phips'." -Lincoln), on that round- 

about excursion through narrow and gloomy 
streets, terminating at Copp's Hill. 

Salutation Street, or Alley, as in the old 
days it was called, comes out opposite Charter 
Street, and it is a walk of three short blocks 

186 




IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

up Hanover to North Bennett Street where 
Master Tileston, a personage in his day, taught 
not only the fictitious Zach Phips but all the 
actual boys of Boston in his famous Old North 
Writing School. "His cocked hat, his pow- 
dered wiof, his lonsf-skirted coat, his volumin- 
ous waistcoat, and lastly his silver-headed 
Malacca stick," says the novelist, " were the 
accessories of a person not to lightly encount- 
ered save by the innocent and pure in heart." 
Skirmishes went on among the boys while 
Master Tileston, familiarly called "Johnny 
Crump," was seemingly intent on copybooks, 
and Zach, one day, was caught whispering. 
So merciless was the thrashing given him that 
the boy whirled about on the pedagogue with 
a "you'll never lick me again, old johnny 
Crump, Crumpity Crump ! " and darted from 
the room never to return, before the amazed 
master could interfere. A large public school 
now stands on the site of the frame house 
where the irascible master held sway. 

Parallel with North Bennet Street and one 
187 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

block east is Tileston Street, named for Bos- 
ton's illustrious school-master and interesting 
to all lovers of the Agnes Surriage, of the 
novel, as beino- the street in which she lived 
while makinof her first home in the town with 
the Widow Ruck. Frankland, whose protege 
the girl then was, found this boarding place 
for her and there she faithfully applied herself 
to the somewhat arduous task of taking on the 
fine polish of a lady. From the windows of 
her room, Bynner tells us, lay outspread the 
Town Dock to far off Froe Lane, bristling 
with the many characteristic features of pro- 
vincial Boston — the fine new hall just given 
by the munificent Faneuil; the Town House ; 
the frowning fortifications of Fort Hill ; the 
shabby little King's Chapel, the towering 
steeple of the Old South ; the royal colors flying 
above Deacon Shem Drowne's Indian imaee on 
the distant province house; the last but not least, 
farther to the west, triple-peaked Beacon Hill. 

The Widow Ruck, an amusing and wholly 
fictitious character, had, the novelist says, a 

iSS 




The belfry tower of the Old North Church, 
As it rose above the graves on the hill, 
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still." 

Longfellow s " Paul Revere 's Ride 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

large thrifty garden which covered a space now 
occupied by several brick blocks, and an odd 
corner of this she was induced, by the persua- 
sive Frankland, to turn over to Agnes. Here 
the then happy fisher girl and the debonnair 
Collector botanized. The hitherto neglected 
corner was speedily filled with curious and 
beautiful plants, for every time Frankland 
came it was with some choice plant or seed 
fetched from abroad which Aones tended with 
devotion. This pretty pastime was fact and 
not fiction, and for this rare garden the novel- 
ist thinks Frankland laid the world under con- 
tribution. 

Only a stone's throw farther on lies Salem 
Street winding as in the old days east and 
west. Part of this ancient street in i 708 was 
known as Back Street from the fact that it 
described the limits and sea margin of the 
town. Fictional interest centres at once in 
Christ Church, the dominant building not only 
of the street but the entire North End. Erected 
in 1723, this church is the oldest in Boston 

191 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

standing on its original ground. Bynner's 
characters did not attend it, but he speaks of 
Frankland's keeping his chronometer by its 
bells which tolled the curfew hour. Mr. Stimson's 
pretty heroine Pirate Gold, Mercedes, some- 
times attended the services in Christ Church, 
escorted by the clumsy Hughson. Here, in 
those anti-Episcopal days, "were scarcely a 
dozen worshippers ; and you might have a 
square, dock-like pew all to yourself, turn your 
back upon the minister, and gaze upon the 
painted angels blowing gilded trumpets in the 
gallery." A poet's rhymes have immortalized 
the steeple of Christ Church as all readers of 
"Paul Revere's Ride " know. 

Beside Christ Church in Salem Street stands 
to-day the curious little house where the child 
Mercedes (Stimson's Pirate Gold) was taken 
to live when James McMurtagh adopted her. 
Jamie, who was Scotch, liked it because it 
might have been a little house in some provin- 
cial town at home. Later in the story Jamie 
sold this house and removed to a more fash- 

192 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ionable quarter only to return to it in after 
years, and there the noble, unselfish old soul 




HOME OF THE M MURTAGHS — SALEM STREET 

" Jamie liked it because it might have been a little 
house in some provincial town at home.'" — Stimson's 
"Pirate Gold." 



in his sixtieth year was attacked by that 
illness which so nearly proved fatal. How 
the heart throbs in watching by his bed- 

193 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



side, where the pathetic old fellow " lay un- 
conscious of earthly things. For many weeks 
his spirit, like a tired bird, hovered between 

this world and the next, 
uncertain where to 
light." To the infinite 
relief of the reader it 
lights on terra firma and 
we leave Jamie happy 
to live again for his lost 
Mercedes's little Sarah 
in the old house in Sa- 
lem Street. 

Turninof north from 
this picturesque dwell- 
ing, we pass up Hull 
Street, which is directly 
opposite Christ Church. 
This quaint street leads 
up a short ascent to 
Copp's Hill burying-ground. Before reaching 
that inclosure, however, we pass on the left, 
half-way up the hill, an old gambrel-roof house, 

194 




THE HOUSE IN HULL STREET 
WHERE GAGE IS SAID TO HAVE 
PLANNED THE BATTLE OF 
BUNKER HILL 




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195 



I N A X D ABOUT BOS T O X 

to w hich — so Job Pray said (Cooper's Lionel 
Lincoln i Gage secretly retired to plan the battle 
of Bunker Hill. Remarkably well preserved 
inside and out is the house, unchanged since it 
was built. It is now occupied by a venerable 
little Irishman "bowed with his fourscore years 
and ten " — a well-known and unique character 
in a neighbourhood Italian— who is persuaded 
sometimes to allow within his gates the 
stranger permitted not to conjure up the 
shades of Cooper's characters, but quaintly 
made conversant of the fact that mine host, 
now retired from active business, is the oldest 
living fish merchant on T \\ harf. 

It is but a few steps on to Copp's Hill bury- 
ino--oround where 

Each in his narrow cell former laid 

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sle $ 

Here, too. sleeps the gentle Grace Osborne, 
who moves like some spirit from another world 
through the pages of The Rebels, the hero of 
which. Captain Somerville, breaking faith with 
her. likewise broke her tender heart. Even-one 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

remembers the exquisite letter of forgiveness 
and farewell she left for him and which was 
fowarded to the King's Head Tavern, Balti- 
more, where he was then supposed to be. 
" Three weeks after a young man called upon 
the sexton and requested the key of Mr. Os- 
borne's tomb. With weak, irregular steps he 
entered the house of death, and raised the lid 
of the coffin last placed there. ... Not a 
sigh-, not a tear relieved the bursting- anguish 
of his heart. His eye accidentally rested on 
the inscription: — Grace Osborne, aged 19. 
Departed this life May 27th, 1769." A month 
later Captain Somerville died and was laid to 
rest not far from his mourned love, in the south- 
east corner of the cemetery where the tomb of 
the Hutchinson family, of which he was a 
member, still remains. The beautiful coat-of- 
arms of the aristocratic family emblazons the 
slab of sand-stone which covers the entrance to 
the tomb desecrated by an act of vandalism, for 
the name of Hutchinson has been obliterated 
and that of Thomas Lewis cut in its place. 

198 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

With broad and brilliant strokes in Lionel 
Lincoln Cooper paints for us this famed hill. 




THE SPOT FROM WHICH LIONEL LINCOLN 
WATCHED THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL 

" — he, too, is for Copp's, where we can all take 
a lesson in arms by studying the manner in which 
Howe wields his battalions." — Cooper 's "Lionel 
Li )i coin." 

He has described it by moonlight, when the 
scene was so weird and uncanny that Lionel 
refused to wander there among the graves ; 

199 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

aeain at night in stirring times when, restless 
and excited, Lionel found himself issuing upon 
the open space that is tenanted by the dead. 
" On this eminence the English general had 
caused a battery of heavy cannon to be raised, 
and Lionel, unwilling to encounter the chal- 
lenge of the sentinels, inclining a little to one 
side, proceeded to the brow of the hill, and 
seating himself on a stone, began to muse 
deeply on his own fortunes and the situation 
of the country. . . . The stillness of midnight 
rested on the scene, and when the loud calls of 
"all's well" ascended from the ships and batter- 
ies, the momentary cry was succeeded by a quiet 
as deep as if the universe slumbered under this 
assurance of safety." From this elevation, with 
Clinton and Burgoyne, Lionel watched through 
a spy-glass the fighting at Bunker Hill — told 
by the novelist in so graphic and pictorial a man- 
ner that Bancroft, the historian, says it is the 
finest description of the battle we have. 

In these days there was an unobstructed 
view of Charlestown, and the whole scene of 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the bloody struggle lay before these men, who, 
in the beginning, thought it a glorious spectacle 
but quickly began to realize that the incessant 
roll of the American musketry was something 
to be respected, nay feared ; and when, as the 
conflict proceeded the result was known, the 
bewildered group on Copps gazed in each 
others' faces with undisguised amazement, and 
then made a mad rush down the hill to the 
shore and a boat which they ordered to quickly 
convey them to the scenes of operations. To 
appreciate the sensation of Major Lincoln and 
his brother officers of that momentous day cne 
must turn to the sixteenth chapter of Lionel Lin- 
coln which alone would have given Cooper fame. 
A stone's throw from Copp's Hill, at the 
corner of Prince and Margaret Streets, stands 
the home of Master John Tileston (Bynner's 
Zachary Phips). Time has laid its destruc- 
tive hand on the old house, which, neverthe- 
less, holds its own as one of the few remainino- 
examples of the simple architecture of pre- 
Revolutionary days. 

203 



DOCK 

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aross - - 

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are - - 

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riest -- 

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" ~ " " " " - the 



IN B O 

"Wild :ribed in 

\V. Chambers's colon The 

tavern — an ancient, discoloured, rami 
structure a 

red porch infr 

„n-boar 
crea: re hich doub: 

an 
t ^cratic neighbourhood. "Warehouses, ship- 
chandlers, ro: - ops 
line :h vacant, bar- 

fcs F groun rare! -:»undec 

wooden fei . . Northward across the 

mis: le roof and 

town reddened in the sun ; to 1 
cannon on Copps g red. p tine sea- 

lover the N est iter W IL From 

lere in th-r : . :he beating of 
drums and the faint squei ng f fifes "ion 

banner /and flapped from Beacon Hill: 

ned the summit of 
ishesc : the Beacon sm-: 
as first ren bv 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



Returning now to Blackstone Street and 
crossing it, we continue a few steps in Hanover 
Street, when a sharp turn to the left brings us 

into Marshall Street 
and up to the Boston 
Stone, where, on the 
night of the 14th of 
August, 1765, Henry 
Osborne lingered to 
watch the ominous 
bon-fire on Fort Hill 
so vividly described 
in the opening chap- 
ter of The Rebels. 
Though this stone 
bears the date of 
1737 and has a 
unique history, it is 
passed unnoticed by 
the majority of per- 
sons who frequent the neighbourhood. 

From here we pass down Union Street or 
take a short cut to North Street by Creek 

206 




h^-^' nin — '. — 

" He leaned a moment on Un- 
ion (Boston) Stone listening to 
the distant tumult." — Lydia M. 
Child's " The Rebels."' ' 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Lane and Scottow's Alley, emerging upon 
Faneuil Hall, in Dock Square. 

Frankland, the Collector (Bynner's Agnes 
Surriage), attended the great meeting there 
when Master John Lovell pronounced the fu- 
neral oration upon the widely mourned Peter 
Faneuil, and the novelist gives us an amusing" 
account of a conversation after the meeting, 
between the Collector and Master Pelham, 
who, jealous of the honour conferred on his 
brother pedagogue, consoled himself by tart 
criticism of the oration. In The Rebels is 
also pictured a Faneuil Hall meeting, this an 
exciting one called by Samuel Adams to pro- 
test against the ruined mansion of Hutchin- 
son and petition the Legislature to repair it at 
the expense of the State. 

On the south side of Faneuil Hall, partially 
hidden in old Corn Court, is standing the his- 
toric Hancock Tavern which figures in Byn- 
ner's Zachary Phips. The stable yard where 
Zach loved to mingle with the crowd of teams- 
ters, hostlers and hangers-on, is no more, but 

209 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



the house itself has undergone few changes 
and its bar would seem to be doing at the 
present time as flourishing a business as in the 
days of Zach and again of Talleyrand, who is 

said to have sojourned 
there when in Boston in 
1 795. The sign of the 
tavern bearing the 
weather-stained features 
of Governor Hancock 
has been removed from 
the door and placed in 
a room teeming with 
historic but, alas! no lit- 
- erary interest. 

Such interest, how- 
ever, centres in the neigh- 
rtrte. bourhood of Dock 

yard of the old Brasier Inn." — c ~ ,..l,.Vk ,V ^1-,^ 

Bynn^s-ZacharyPhipsr Square, which is the 
scene of much of Lionel Lincoln. When the 
young British major frequented it, its centre was 
a swinging bridge thrown across an inlet from 
the harbour and extending a short distance into 




IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the area, forming a shallow dock. The square 
was composed of low, gloomy buildings, in one 
of which, a warehouse standing within the 
memory of many persons, the mysterious 
Ralph lived with Abigail and Job Pray. 

A short walk up through here across Adams 
Square and we come upon Cornhill, as quaint 
and interesting as its London prototype. 
The character of the street has changed some- 
what since Trowbridge's. Mart in Merrivale, the 
hero of the novel of that name, sought out 
a publisher there for his precious manuscript, 
The Beggar of Bagdad, but if publishers have 
largely abandoned it to other trades, booksellers 
still find it a lucrative field, and on either side 
of its winding street are fascinating antiquar- 
ian shops. Martin Merrivale hopefully seek- 
ing out a publisher lives through sensations 
still vivid in the experience of his creator, John 
T. Trowbridge, when, as a young man, he went 
to Xew York to seek his literary fortunes 

It is more than probable that to Cornhill 
also came the brave-hearted old Master Byles 

213 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Gridley (Holmes's The Guardian Angel), 
bringing his protege, the embryo poet, Gifted 
Hopkins, to call on a publisher who might be 
persuaded to purchase his MS., a collection 
of poems entitled " Blossoms of the Soul." In 
referring to this fictitious young poet Holmes 
says: "Perhaps I have been too hard with 
Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of rhymesters to 
which he belongs. I ought not to forget that 
I, too, introduced myself to the reading world 
in a thin volume of verses, many of which had 
better not have been written, and would not 
be reprinted now, but for the fact that they 
have established a right to a place among my 
poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, 
although the writing- of verses is often a mark 
of mental weakness, I cannot forget that 
Joseph Story and George Bancroft each pub- 
lished his little book of rhymes, and that John 
Ouincy Adams had left many poems on record, 
the writing of which did not interfere with the 
vast and important labors of his illustrious 
career." 

214 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Across from Cornhill, on the space now oc- 
cupied by Codmen's Buildings, once stood 
Earl's Coffee-house, from which Zach (Bynner's 
Zachary Phips) started out to New York on 
the fast mail coach, the Flying Cloud. At the 
head of Cornhill, in the former residence of 
one John Wendell, was the Royal Custom 
House at the time Frankland (Bynner's Agues 
Surriage) was Collector. Near by was the 
studio of John Smybert, who, by Frankland's 
order, painted the portrait of Agnes. Some- 
times at her sittings, the novelist says, she ran 
across the little Jack Copley whom Smybert 
was teaching, and of whom he truly prophesied 
when he said : " He hae the richt stuff in him. 
. . . he's bound to go far ahead o' his old mais- 
ter ane o' thae days." Through this old Scot's 
estate Brattle Street in after times burst forth 
into Scollay Square. 

Just south of here in Queen Street, now 
Court, lived the Osbornes {The Rebels) where 
Governor Hutchinson and his family took 
refuge at the time his mansion was attacked. 

215 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

In Queen Street, says the author of Cardigan, 
was the elegant mansion of Mrs. Hamilton 
who plays a leading part in the book. Here 
also was the Court-house and prison where 
Cardigan and Jack Mount were confined. 
" From the 29th of October until the 15th day 
of December chained ankle to ankle, wrist to 
wrist, and wearing a steel collar from which 
chains hunor and were riveted to the rino-s on 
my legs, I lay in that vile iron cage known as 
the ' Pirates' Chapel' in company with Mount 
and eight sullen, cursing ruffians." 

Identified with this street are the tragic fig- 
ures of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter of which 
Holmes wrote : 

/ snatch the book, along whose burning leaves 
His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves. 

The jail where Hester Prynne was confined 
was the Old Prison in Prison Lane, as it was 
called before it became Queen and later Court 
Street. This is not the jail described in Car- 
digan, but a structure of a much earlier date. 
" Some fifteen or twenty years after the settle- 

216 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ment of the town {The Scarlet Letter) the 
wooden jail was already marked with weather- 
stains and other indications of age, which gave 
a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and 
gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous 
iron-work of its oaken door looked more an- 
tique than anything else in the New World. 
Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never 
to have known a youthful era. Before this 
ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel- 
track of the street, was a grass-plot, much 
over-grown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, 
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently 
found something congenial in the soil that had 
so early borne the black flower of civilized 
society, a prison. But, on one side of the por- 
tal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a 
wild-rose bush, covered, in this month of June, 
with its delicate gems, which might be imagined 
to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to 
the prisoner as he went in, and to the con- 
demned criminal as he came forth to his doom 
in token that the deep heart of Nature could 

217 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

pity and be kind to him." This jail as well as 
"Pirates' Chapel" (Chamber's Cardigan) 
stood on the site of the present old Court 
House in Court Street. 

The immediate neighbourhood was the mar- 
ket place in which Hester Prynne (The Scarlet 
Letter) was forced to exhibit herself with her 
baby in her arms and the ignominious letter 
on her breast, and at the western extremity of 
the market place was the scaffold, " a penal 
machine which now for two or three trenera- 
tions past, has been merely historical and tra- 
ditional among us, but was held, in the old 
time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promo- 
tion of good citizenship, as ever was the guil- 
lotine among the terrorists of France. . . . Hes- 
ter's sentence bore that she should stand a cer- 
tain time upon the platform, but without under- 
going the grip about the neck and confinement 
of the head, the proneness to which was the most 
devilish characteristic of this ugly engine." 

The scaffold stood nearly beneath the eaves 
of Boston's earliest church situated where now 

218 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

stands the Rogers building'. Historically this 
was the first church of Boston built originally 
on ground at the head of what is now State 
Street, a site occupied by Brazer's Building, 
but in 1640, just before the opening of The 
Scarlet Letter romance, it was removed to the 
locality Hawthorne describes. There the Rev. 
Mr. Dimmesdale preached the Election Ser- 
mon, and vivid in every mind must be his sen- 
sational disclosure and the events preceding 
and following it. That The Scarlet Letter 
is founded on fact is well known, but it has 
been stoutly denied that Hawthorne drew his 
erring minister from the Rev. Thomas Cob- 
bett, of Lynn, who, in 1649, tne >' ear named, 
actually delivered the Election Sermon. 

In this locality stood the town pump in 
Court Street, which, aided by Hawthorne's 
Muse, thus invoked the passer-by : " Like a 
dram-seller on the Mall at muster-day I cry 
aloud to all and sundry, in my plainest accents 
and at the very tip-top of my voice : ' Here it is, 
gentlemen ! Here is the good liquor ! Walk up, 

219 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

walk up, gentlemen, walk tip, walk up. Here is 
the superior stuff ; here is the unadulterated 
ale of Father Adam — better than Cognac, Hol- 
lands, Jamaica, strong beer, or wine of any 
price ; here it is by the hogshead or single 
glass, and not a cent to pay ! Walk up, gen- 
tlemen, walk up, and help yourselves !' ' 

In modern Court Street was the office of 
Mr. David Willis (Aldrich's Goliath) and pre- 
sumably of another lawyer in fiction, Tom 
Harbinger (Bates's Love in a Cloud) who was 
never known to stir from his orifice without his 
bag — "a lawyer's green bag is in Boston as 
much a part of his dress as his coat is." 

IV. STATE STREET AND THE KING'S 
CHAPEL NEIGHBOURHOOD 

WE now reach the head of State 
Street where stands, as in the old 
days, the Town House, now 
known as the Old State House. In one of its 
state rooms occurred the celebration in honour 
of the Louisburg- heroes to which reference has 




ffi ^ ^ ^ 

1 333 B -i I 

H 3 ?g u 



THE OLD STATE HOI 



' Through days of sorrow and of mirth, 
Through days of death and days of birth, 
Through every swift vicissitude 

Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood 
& — Longjello't 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

been made of the description of this event in 
the pages of Agues Surriage. Among the 
many pictures adorning the rooms of this his- 
toric building, now preserved as a museum, two 
have distinct literary value — one, the full- 
length portrait of that noted woman and novel- 
ist, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis ; the other a re- 
production of the portrait of Holmes's cele- 
brated "Dorothy O." his 

Grandmother s mother : her age, I guess 
Thirteen summers, or something less; 
Girlish bust, ut womanly air ; 
Smooth, square forehead with uprolled hair. 
Lips that lover has never kissed; 
Taper fingers and slender wrist; 
Hanging sleeves of stiff" brocade; 
So they painted the little maid. 

Standing beneath the lion and the unicorn 
of the old State House we find Jamie McMur- 
tagh (Stimson's Pirate Gold) on the twenty- 
seventh day of May, eighteen fifty-four, 
watching a scene memorable in the history of 
Boston and thus graphically pictured for us 
by the novelist: "Through historic State 

223 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Street, cleared now as for a triumph, marched 
a company of Federal troops. Behind them, 
in a hollow square, followed a body of rough- 
appearing men, each with a short Roman 
sword and a revolver ; and in the open centre, 
alone and handcuffed, one trembling negro. 
The fife had stopped, and they marched now 
in a hushed silence to the tap of a solitary 
drum ; and behind came the naval marines 
with cannon. The street was hung across 
with flags, union down or draped in black, but 
the crowd was still. And all along the street, 
as far down as the wharf, where the free sea 
shone blue in the May sunshine, stood, on 
either side, a close rank of Massachusetts 
militia, with bayonets fixed, four thousand 
strong, restraining, behind, the fifty thousand 
men who muttered angrily, but stood still. 
Thus much it took to hold the old Bay State 
down to the Union in 1854, and carry one 
slave from it to bondage. Down the old 
street it was South Carolina that walked that 
day beneath the national flag, and Massachu- 

224 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

setts that did homage, biding her time until 
her sister State should turn her arms upon the 
emblem." 

A familiar tramping ground was this busy 
commercial thoroughfare to Jamie, who always 
walked " twice daily up the street to the Old 
Colony Bank, bearing in a rusty leathern wal- 
let anything, from nothing to a hundred thou- 
sand dollars, the daily notes and discounts of 
James Bowdoin's Sons." This bank, under 
the disguise of the Old Colony, is the Boston 
National Bank, which, since 1803, has been 
doing business at Number 50 State Street. 
The imaginary Mr. James Bowdoin was one of 
the directors, as was in reality his prototype, 
Mr. Josiah Bradlee, and it will be remembered 
that Jamie took a clerkship there when his old 
firm ceased to do business in India Wharf. 
Jamie, a most Dickensy character, owes his 
being to the brain of Mr. Stimson, but it was 
said that he is suggestive now and then of a 
former messenger of a bank named Brecken- 
ridge, who, early in the century, began life as 

225 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

an " inside man " — as the Boston phrase is — 
in the Bradlee family. The pirate gold from 




" Jamie always walked twice daily up State Street to the Old 
Colony Bank, bearing in a rusty leathern wallet anything, from 
nothing to a hundred thousand dollars, the daily notes and discounts 
of James Bowdoin's Sons." — Stimsoris ''Pirate Gold." 

which Mr. Stimson's story gets its title, and 
which was responsible for all the joy and misery 
in Jamie's life, really lay, as described, in its little 

226 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

mouldy bag " for nearly thirty years, high on a 
shelf, in an old chest, behind three tiers of 
tins of papers, in the deepest corner of the 
vault of the bank. It was never merged in 
other funds, nor converted, nor put at interest. 
. . but carried, in specie, in its original pack- 
age • four hundred and twenty-three American 
eao-les and fifteen hundred and fifty-six Span- 

ish doubloons. Deposited by ■ de Soto, 

June twenty-fourth, eighteen hundred and 
twenty-nine; for the benefit of whom it may 
concern? And it very much concerned Jamie, 
whom to know is to sorrow for and love. 

The State Street of to-day is graphically de- 
scribed by Mr. Edward Bellamy in Looking 
Backward. " Toward three o'clock," the hero 
says, " I stood on State Street, staring, as if I 
had never seen them before, at the banks and 
brokers' offices, and other financial institutions, 
of which there had been in the State Street of 
my vision no vestige. Business men, confi- 
dential clerks, and errand boys were thronging 
in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a 

227 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

few minutes of the closing hour. Opposite 
me was the bank where I did business, and 
presently I crossed the street, and going in 
with the crowd, stood in a recess of the way 
looking on at the army of clerks handling 
money, and the cues of depositors at the teller's 
windows. An old gentleman whom I knew, a 
director of the bank, stopped a moment. ' In- 
teresting sight, isn't it, Mr. West?' he said. 
'Wonderful piece of mechanism; I find it so 
myself. . . . It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's 
what I call it. Did you ever think that the 
bank is the heart of the business system ? 
From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux, 
the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It 
will flow out again in the morning ;' and pleased 
with his little conceit, the old man passed on 
smiling. . . . Alas for the poor old bank direc- 
tor with his poem ! He had mistaken the 
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the 
heart." 

Retracing our steps back again through 
Court Street we come to Tremont Row where 

223 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the hero of Miss Phelps's A Singular Life 
had his unpleasant quarter of an hour with the 
maudlin Job Slip. Bayard, it will be remem- 
bered, was driving to the station with Helen 
Carruth when he came upon the delinquent. 
" Struggling in the iron grip of two policemen 
of assorted sizes, the form and tongue of Job 
Slip were forcibly ornamenting Tremont Row." 
Rescued by his minister, "Job, who was not 
too far gone to recognize his preserver, now 
threw his arms affectionately around Bayard's 
recoiling neck and became unendurably maud- 
lin. In a voice audible the width of the street, 
and with streaming tears and loathsome bless- 
ings, he identified Bayard as his dearest, best, 
nearest, and most intimate of friends." 

Just beyond here in Tremont Street is the 
Museum, a theatre dear to the hearts of the 
Bostonese, where Edward Everett Hale's de- 
lightful characters go frequently to see the 
well-remembered William Warren. In A 
Modern Instance Mr. Howells describes the 
place as old Bostonians remember it : ' They 

229 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

passed in through the long colonnaded vesti- 
bule, with its paintings and plaster casts, and 
rows of birds and animals in glass cases on 
either side, and Marcia gave scarcely a glance 
at any of those objects, endeared by associa- 
tion, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston 
playgoer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians 
swarming upon him ; the painty-necked os- 
triches and pelicans ; the mummied mermaid 
under a glass bell ; the governor's portraits ; 
the stuffed elephant ; Washington crossing the 
Delaware ; Cleopatra applying the asp ; Sir 
William Pepperel at full length, on canvas, and 
the pagan months and seasons in plaster, . , . 
were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and 
Bartley moved scarcely more than real." 

Adjoining the Museum is the venerated 
burying-ground and 

— Chapel, last of sublunary tilings 

That shocks our echoes with the name of Kings. 

Hawthorne tells us that Dimmesdale and 
Roger Chillingworth (The Scarlet Letter) 
dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the 

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231 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

site on which King's Chapel has since been 
built. "It had the graveyard," says the ro- 
mancer, "on one side, and so well adapted to 
call up serious reflections, suited to their re- 
spective employments, in both minister and 
the man of physic." 

Rich in fictional association is this burying- 
ground where, in their last sleep lie Dimmes- 
dale and Hester Prynne. Many years after 
Dimmesdale died "a new crave was delved 
near an old and sunken one, in that burial- 
ground beside which King's Chapel has since 
been built. It was near that old and sunken 
grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust 
of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. 
Yet one tombstone served for both. All 
around, there were monuments carved with 
armorial bearings ; and on this simple slab of 
slate there appeared the semblance of an en- 
graved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's 
wording of which miodit serve for a motto and 
brief description of our now concluded legend ; 
so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever- 

233 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

glowing point of light gloomier than the 
shadow : — 

" 'On a field, sable, the It Iter A, gules' " 

To curious investigators are pointed out 
several graves which bear a slight resemblance 
to the one thus described, on which in Haw- 
thorne's day, he asserts, was plainly to be seen 
the letter A, visible now on no tombstone 
save only as it takes form in the necromancy 
of the imagination. 

Here, too, lie the Shirleys who figure in the 
pages of Agnes Surriage and Mrs. Lechmere, 
Ralph, Job and Abigail Pray of Lionel Lin- 
coln. The tomb of the Shirleys — real per- 
sonages in fiction — remains, but it is impossible 
to designate the spot where the proud families 
of Lechmere and Lincoln were wont to inter 
their dead. The slate, Cooper says, has long 
since mouldered from the wall ; the sod has 
covered the stone. 

King's Chapel, venerated by present day 
Bostonians, vies with the old burying-ground 
in fictional interest. Here, with his relatives 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

and brother officers, Major Lincoln (Cooper's 
Lionel Lincoln) worshipped ; so, too, did the 
Bowdoins, Jamie and Mercedes {Pirate Gold) ; 
Frankland, Agnes and the Shirleys {Agnes 
Snrriage), and Olive Chancellor (Henry 
James's The Bostonians). Lionel and Cecil 
were married there during the Revolution and 
a glance into the interior of the church shows 
the same laboured columns with their slender 
shafts admired by Lionel and the same chancel 
rails on which Cecil threw her mantle before 
accompanying him to the foot of the altar. 
" With some eclat," St. Clair and Mercedes 
{Pirate Gold) were likewise married there. 

The mind busying itself with these imagin- 
ary festivities sees them fade away, to be fol- 
lowed by two funeral processions, which rise 
from the pages of fiction and flit phantom-like 
down the aisles. The first is that of Mrs. 
Shirley, the Governor's lady {Agnes Surriagc), 
which peoples the church to the limit of the 
galleries with her mourners — "the Honour- 
able his Majesty's Council and the House of 

237 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Representatives and avast Number of the prin- 
cipal Gentry of both Sexes of this and the 
Neighbouring Towns." This distinguished 
gathering melts away and a smaller one files in 
following the casket of Mrs. Lechmere {Lionel 
Lincoln) whose funeral train " though respect- 
able was far from extending to that display of 
solemn countenances which Boston, in its peace 
and pride, would not have failed to exhibit on 
any similar occasion." On the south side of 
the wall of the Chapel is a mural tablet to 
Frances Shirley, the Governor's lady who lived 
in fact as well as fancy. 

In The Bostonians Henry James asserts that 
to the intense Olive Chancellor, evening ser- 
vice at King's Chapel was only one degree 
more solemn than o-oing- to t j le theatre. Anna 
Farquhar, the author of Her Boston Experi- 
ences, humourously chronicles a woman suff ra- 
cist meeting- here which the heroine out of 
curiosity attended with Aunt Drusilla. But a 
true spirit of reverence for " the quaint church 
with its high-backed box pews cushioned in 

233 




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239 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

red stuff, its old-fashioned English gallery and 
high pulpit reached by winding stairs," took 
her there many a Sunday afternoon to vesper 
service. 

Shadowed by this ancient church and bury- 
ing-ground, in busy School Street, in front of 
the City Hall, stands the statue of Benjamin 
Franklin, in alluding to which Dr. Hale in My 
Double and How He Undid Me says : "Rich- 
ard Greenouodi once told me that in studying 1 
for the statue of Franklin he found that the 
left side of the great man's face was philosophic 
and reflective, and the right side funny and 
smiling. If you go and look at the bronze 
statue you will find he has repeated this ob- 
servation there for posterity. The eastern 
profile is the portrait of the statesman Frank- 
lin, the western of poor Richard." 

Across the street is the Parker House or 
" Parker's" as it is familiarly known where the 
" Saturday Club gathered about the long table 
(Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy') such a rep- 
resentation of all that was best in American 

241 



F I W A I (AMBLES 

literati:- is bad never I within 

? - -v.;.'. .1 : :: .— ' [ -: :' :/.-_- A:::-. -.:..-- 




i 



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— 

_ . . . . . _ - 

B 



whom educated foreio — 

out of consideration official dignitaries, 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

whose temporal*}- importance makes them ob- 
jects of curiosity — were seated at that board. 




" I never can go into that famoos ' Corner Book- 

and look over the new books . . . without 

g half a dozen which T want to read, or at least 

to know something about." — Hoi". r tfu 

Howells makes frequent allusions to this hotel 
in his Boston novels, particularly in April 
Hopes and here Craighead ( Truth Dexter) dis- 

843 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

patched a significant message over the wires 
to Truth in Alabama. 

Just below this house at the northeast cor- 
ner of School and Washington Streets stands 
a quaint little building, erected in i 712, where, 
commercially speaking, much of the Boston 
fiction has had its beginnings. This is the old 
Corner Bookstore, fifty years ago "a nervous 
centre of the growing literary system, where," 
says a contemporary writer, " Mr. Fields played 
destiny to the association of authors and 
launched the second volume of the Atlantic, 
the first that bore his imprint." Perhaps it is 
not generally remembered that this magazine 
owes its name to Holmes. A favourite haunt 
was this bookstore of the genial Autocrat, who 
in alluding to it once wrote : " I never can 
go into that famous ' Corner Bookstore ' and 
look over the new books in the row before me, 
as I enter the door, without seeing half a 
dozen which I want to read, or at least to 
know something about. . . . The titles of many 
of them interest me. I look into one or two, 

244 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

perhaps. I have sometimes picked up a line 
or sentence, in these momentary glances be- 
tween the uncut leaves of a new book, which 
I have never forgotten." 

V WHEN COMMERCIAL BOSTON 
WAS RESIDENTIAL 

THE commercial section of the Boston 
of to-day differs from the Boston of 
fifty years ago as much, perhaps, as 
the city of the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury had changed from the town of wooden 
houses of the Revolutionary era. Modern en- 
terprise has transformed the old streets, while 
a whole and entirely new Boston has risen on 
land which was submerged by every tide and 
where in fresh winds the salt whitecaps rolled 
and tumbled oftentimes to the destruction of 
the viaduct of the railroads which had boldly 
bridged the waste of waters which surrounded 
the almost inland city. In the beginning of its 
life Boston was essentially a commercial town 
and its inhabitants looked to the sea for their 

245 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

bread and for their riches. The wealth of its 
people was in ships above and far above every- 
thing else. With the broadening of its scope 
as the profits from manufacturing came to the 
front, the relative importance of its commer- 
cial interests declined, and the residences of its 
wealthiest citizens, instead of clinging 1 along the 
water front, where tall masts could be seen 
from the windows and where the smell of tar 
constantly greeted the resident, pushed toward 
the westward, as if the salt water had become 
of less interest. 

Beofinninuf our rambles in this section of the 
city at Fort Hill Square we recall the days of 
The Rebels when the spot was not the level 
square we find it, but a hill eighty feet high 
and well fortified. After the Revolution the 
hill, crowned with its park and stately man- 
sions, as well as the streets at its foot or which 
crawled up its steep sides, were the birthplaces 
of the older generation of aristocratic present- 
day Bostonians. In imagination we climb to 
its summit to find, as described in Pirate Gold, 

246 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the home of Miss Abigail Dowse which stood 
where the sea breezes blew fresh through the 
white June roses in the garden. 

Leaving the Square and wandering west- 
ward through High Street we come upon 
Pearl Street, where, near High, once stood 
(1822-1849) tne Athenaeum, a most interesting 
picture of which is preserved for us in the 
pages of Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy. "In 
those days," he reminisces, " the Athenaeum 
Picture Gallery was a principal centre of at- 
traction to young Boston people and their 
visitors. Many of us got our first idea of art, 
to say nothing of our first lessons in the com- 
paratively innocent flirtations of our city's 
primitive period, in that agreeable resort of 
amateurs and artists. How the pictures on 
those walls in Pearl Street do keep their 
places in the mind's gallery ! Trumbull's 
Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it for 
one of our sunset afterglows ; and Neagle's full- 
length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt 
sleeves ; and Copley's long waistcoated gentle- 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

men and satin-clad ladies — they looked like 
gentlemen and ladies, too; and Stuart's florid 
merchants and high-waisted matrons ; and All- 
ston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, un- 
impassioned women, not forgetting Florimel 
in full flight on her interminable rocking-horse, 
— you may still see her at the Art Museum; 
and the rival landscapes of Doughty and 
Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in 
those days ; and the Murillo, — not from Mar- 
shal Soult's collection; and the portrait of 
Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the 
Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's alle- 
gorical pictures, and his immense and dreary 
canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and 
the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look 
as if they must have been thrown in for noth- 
ing ; and West's brawny Lear tearing his 
clothes to pieces. But why go on with the 
catalogue, when most of these pictures can be 
seen either at the Athenaeum building in Bea- 
con Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired 
or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not 

2J.8 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

more generously, than in those earlier years 
when we looked at them through the japanned 
fish-horns ? " 

If we turn from here into Pearl Place which 
runs through to Oliver Street we can conjure 
up the residence of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum 
(Holmes's The Guardian Angel), for this was 
undoubtedly the locality described in the novel 
as Carat Place. Many things transpired in this 
house, notably the party given for Myrtle at 
which dear old Master Byles Gridley, Gifted 
Hopkins and Clement Lindsay were exhibited 
as lions. " Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though 
her acquaintances were chiefly in the world of 
fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weak- 
ness for what she called clever people. She 
therefore always variegated her parties with a 
streak of young artists and writers, and a liter- 
ary lady or two; and, if she could lay hands 
on a first-class celebrity, was as happy as an 
Amazon who had captured a Centaur. . . . 
She knew how to give a party. Let her only 
have carte blanche for flowers, music and 

249 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

champagne, she used to tell her lord, and she 
would see to the rest. . . He needn't be afraid : 
all he had to do was to keep out of the way. . . 
Labour was beautifully subdivided in this lady's 
household. It was old Ketchum's business to 
make money and he understood it. It was 
Mrs. K.'s business to spend money, and she 
knew how to do it." Somewhere near here 
was the fashionable boarding school which 
Myrtle attended " where there were some very 
good instructors for girls who wished to get 
up useful knowledge in case they might marry 
professors or ministers." 

Parallel with Pearl Street and next to it runs 
Congress Street originally called Green Lane, 
but known as Atkinson Street when this sec- 
tion of the town was residential. Here, not 
far from Milk Street, was, says Holmes, in his 
novel A Mortal Antipathy, "a. large, square 
painted brick house, in which lived a leading 
representative of old-fashioned coleopterous 
Calvinism, and from which emerged one of 
the liveliest of literary butterflies. The father 

250 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

was editor of the 'Boston Recorder,' a very re- 
spectable but far from amusing paper, most 
largely patronized by that class of the com- 
munity which spoke habitually of the first day 
of the week as ' the Sabbuth.' The son was 
the editor of several different periodicals in 
succession, none of them over severe or serious, 
and of many pleasant books, filled with lively 
descriptions of society, which he studied on the 
outside with a quick eye for form and colour, 
and with a certain amount of sentiment, not 
very deep but real, though somewhat frothed 
over by his worldly experiences." These two 
men were Nathaniel Willis and his more 
widely known son Nathaniel P. Willis, de- 
scribed by Holmes as something between a re- 
membrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipa- 
tion of Oscar Wilde. 

From Cono-ress Street continuing through 
High Street we come next to Federal, of in- 
terest to the fictional rambler because here 
was that old building — a terra-cotta manufac- 
tory where Grant Herman (Arlo Bates's The 

251 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Pagans) had his studio. "It was a great mis- 
shapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, 
and disproportionately high, with undressed 
brick walls and cement floor. The upper half 
of one of the end walls was taken up with large 
windows, before which were drawn dingy cur- 
tains. Here and there about the place were scat- 
tered modeling-stands, water-tanks mounted 
upon rude tripods, casts, and the usual lumberof 
a sculptor's studio ; while upon the walls were 
stuck pictures, sketches and reproductions in 
all sorts of capricious groupings. In one cor- 
ner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up 
against the wall, over the rude railing of which 
looked the heads of a couple of legless statues. 
From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend 
until a door near the roof was reached, leading 
to unknown regions well up in the building 
behind which the studio had been built as an 
afterthoueht. On shelves were confusedlv dis- 
posed dusty bits of bronze, plaster, coarse pot- 
tery and rare glass ; things valueless and things 
beyond price standing in careless fellowship. 

252 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

A canvas of Corot looked down upon a gro- 
tesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful 
bronze reproduction of a vase of Michael An- 
ofelo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean- 
pot full of tobacco ; a crumpled cravat was 
thrown carelessly over the arm of a dancing 
faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless ani- 
mals were apparently making their way with 
great difficulty through a collection of pipes, 
broken modeling-tools, faded .flowers and. loose 

papers Everywhere ft was evident that the 

studio of Herman differed from heaven in 
at least its first law." 

In his description of this Mr. Bates permits 
himself one of his rare drawings "from the 
model." The original, the studio of Bartlett, 
the well-known sculptor, was the fascinating 
place pictured in the novel. Here, many a 
night in conclave gay gathered that brilliant 
group of men typical of the finest spirit of Bo- 
hemianism as lived twenty years ago in Boston 
by such men as Bartlett, Hunt and George 
Fuller — -friends and associates of Mr. Bates 

253 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

whom it is natural to suppose were more or less 
in his mind when he created The Pagans. 

In an old house in Federal Street Miss Lu- 
cretia and other members of the aristocratic 
Daintry family (James's A New England Win- 
ter) were born in the early part of the last cen- 
tury. This locality in its modern commercial 
aspect is identified with The Rise of Silas 
Lapliam, for here was his counting-room and 
the warehouses where the redoubtable Colonel 
carried on his mineral paint business. "The 
streets were all narrow and most of them 
crooked in that quarter of the town ; but at the 
end of one the spars of a vessel penciled 
themselves delicately against the cool blue of 
the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell 
pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, 
and of oil. . . The cobblestones of the pave- 
ment were worn with the dint of ponderous 
wheels, and discoloured with iron rust from 
them; here and there, in wandering streaks 
over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt 
water with which the street had been sprinkled." 

254 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Turning back from Federal through High, 
we come into Summer Street, famed as the most 
beautiful residential thoroughfare of its day in 
Boston. In writing of this neighbourhood in 
Hitherto Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney reminds us 
that those were the days " when the city was 
not conglomerate but individual, and there 
were houses of home quiet in cool, watered 
streets and unprofaned ' Places,' where vines 
covered the house fronts and cashed birds sansf 
in the windows, and great crowns of forest 
trees surged up among the chimneys." Boston, 
she says, was in her pleasant young matronhood 
then. Near Church Green at the intersection 
of Bedford and Summer Streets — the trianQfu- 
lar piece of land, on which then stood a church, 
is now solidly built over by wholesale stores — 
lived the Holgates {Hitherto) with a charming 
garden at the back of their house. In much 
of her Boston fiction Mrs. Whitney describes 
city life with a rural flavour. 

Washington Street, busiest of thoroughfares, 
into which Summer leads, in its shopping dis- 

255 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

trict fifty years ago is referred to in Mrs. Whit- 
ney's Hitherto as "dear old mixed-up Wash- 
ington Street, where everything was small and 
wedged together and you knew your way by 
the angles and corners, and nothing stared out 
at you through great plate glass, but you must 
know enough to beein with to oro in and en- 
quire." That priggish young hero of Mr. Henry 
James's A New England Winter, Florimond 
(who owed his romantic name to the fact that 
everyone was reading ballads in Boston at the 
time he was born, and his mother had found 
the name in a ballad), in walking through 
Washington Street observed that " supreme in 
the thoroughfare was the rigid groove of the 
railway, where were oblong receptacles of fab- 
ulous capacity, governed by familiar citizens, 
jolted and jingled eternally, close on each oth- 
er's rear, absorbing and emitting innumerable 
specimens of a single type. The road on 
either side was traversed periodically by the 
sisterhood of shoppers laden with satchels 
and parcels and protected by a round-backed 

256 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

policeman." Though this was as seen by 
Florimond twenty years ago, it remains an 
exact picture of the street to-day. 

Mr. Howells, in A Woman s Reason, makes 
a characteristic comment in writing of this 
locality when he says : " There is doubtless 
more shopping in New York or London or 
Paris, but in these cities it is dispersed over a 
larger area, and nowhere in the world perhaps 
has shopping such an intensity of physiognomy 
as in Boston. It is unsparingly sincere in its 
expression. It means business, and the sole 
business of the city seems to be shopping." 

This street produced a most unpleasant 
effect upon the hero of Bellamy's Looking 
Backward when he awoke from his long sleep 
to the Boston of the nineteenth century. " I 
reached Washington Street at the busiest 
point, and there I stood and laughed aloud, 
to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life 
I could not have helped it, with such a mad 
humour was I moved at sight of the intermi- 
nable rows of stores on either side, up and 

257 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

down the street as far as I could see — scores of 
them, to make the spectacle more utterly pre- 
posterous — within a stone's throw devoted to 
selling the same sort of goods. Stores ! stores ! 
stores ! miles of stores ! Ten thousand stores 
to distribute the goods needed by this one city, 
which in my dream had been supplied with all 
things from a single warehouse, as they were 
ordered through one great store in every quar- 
ter, where the buyer, without waste of time 
or labour, found under one roof the world's 
assortment in whatever line he desired." 

Leaving the shopping district and proceed- 
ing eastward we approach, at the corner of 
Washington and Milk streets, that hallowed 
spot where stands the Old South Church, one 
of the oldest monuments in Boston. So splen- 
didly historical a thing was not to be ignored 
by the poet and novelist. Sings Dr. Holmes: 

Full sevenscore years our city's pride — 

The comely southern spire — 
Has cast its shadow, and defied 

The storm, the foe, the fire, 

25S 




" Full sevenscore years our city's pride- 
The comely southern spire — 
Has cast its shadow, and defied 
The storm, the foe, the fire." 

— Holmes. 



259 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

In the eighteenth century the people of Lydia 
M. Child's Rebels listened with varied emo- 
tions to the deafening clang from the steeple 
which was part of the celebration of the repeal 
of the Stamp Act. And Cooper's British 
Lionel Lincoln on his return to Boston had 
his first glimpse of the edifice - — known through- 
out New England with a species of veneration 
— when led there by Job Pray, who said: 
" This is what you call a church, though I call 
it a meetin' 'us. ... It's no wonder you don't 
know it, for what the people built for a temple 
the Kin£ has turned into a stable." On enter- 
ing, Cooper tells us, Lionel was amazed to find 
he stood in an area fitted for the exercise of 
the cavalry. The naked galleries and many of 
the original ornaments were standing ; but the 
accommodations below were destroyed, and in 
their places the floor had been covered with 
earth for the horses and their riders to prac- 
tice in the cavesson. " The abominations of 
the place even now offended his senses, as he 
stood on that spot where he remembered so 

261 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

often to have seen the grave and pious colo- 
nists assemble in crowds to worship." This is 
what is meant by the last line on the tablet 
now in front of the church, which in its en- 
tirety reads : 

Old South. 

Church gathered in 1669. 

First House built in 1670. 

This House erected 1729. 

Desecrated by British Troops, 1775-6. 

Chaplain J. J. Kane chooses this old land- 
mark whereon to hang his weird tale, Ilian; or 
the Curse of the Old South Church of Boston, 
which, as he says, is the story of a great crime 
and the punishment meted out to the guilty 
— in the narration of which he apparently 
drew inspiration from every quarter of the 
Qflobe and the oceans of the world, which he 
takes pleasure in mentioning at length in his 
introduction, written in 1888 on board the U. S. 
flagship Pensacola. The porch of the church 
is the scene of many secret meetings between 

262 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Professor Homerand, of this novel, and the 
beautiful Southern spy, Helen Claymuire, of 
South Carolina, frequently at an hour when 
the bell tolled midnight. Here, frenzied at 
the thought that the Professor meant to marry 
Miss Rathmire, the Southern woman called 
down the malediction of retributive divine 
justice upon their union. It was a terrible 
curse — prophetic of accumulated miseries — 
and with it she left him. " He looked up at the 
face of the clock to find pity there, but the 
square steeple only frowned down upon him, 
as if to corroborate the fearful words just 
spoken." 

All of which did not prevent this Dr. Jekyll- 
and-Mr.-Hyde sort of man from marrying Miss 
Rathmire on the day appointed. "At noon 
the bell in the steeple of the Old South Church 
rang- out a wedding- refrain, and the edifice was 
packed to overflowing. After the ceremony, 
in the porch of the church, the bridegroom was 
destined to encounter his former love stand- 
ing . . . like a statue of the goddess Athena, 

263 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

calm, dignified and haughty, with a look of 
scorn that pierced to the soul of the guilty 
man." How the curse affected the life of the 
Professor, all who run may read in the pages of 
Ilian. Emerging from the porch — by Chap- 
lain Kane so darkly shadowed — into the sun- 
shine of the street, it is charming to look up 
and imagine what, no doubt, the poet N. P. 
Willis saw : 

On the cross-beam tinder the Old South bell 
The nest of a pigeon is builded well. 

In Colonial days the Old South stood al- 
most under the windows of the dignified Prov- 
ince House, the residence of many of the 
royal governors. This ancient abode was 
standing as late as 1864 on the site of what is 
now Province Court and was originally sur- 
rounded by fine lawns and trees as shown in 
the illustration. Hawthorne, who weaves four 
fanciful legends about it — Howes Masquerade, 
Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanor e' s 
Mantle, and Old Esther Dudley — thus describes 
it in his day : " Entering an arched passage, 

264 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 




"The square front of the Province House, 
three stories hig-h, and surmounted by a cupola, 
on the top of which a gilded Indian was dis- 
cernible." — Hawthorne s "Legends of the Prov- 
ince House." 



which penetrated through the middle of a 
brick row of shops, a few steps transported me 
from the busy heart of modern Boston into a 

265 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

small and secluded courtyard. One side of this 
space was occupied by the square front of the 
Province House, three stories high, and sur- 
mounted by a cupola, on the top of which a 
gilded Indian was discernible, with his bow 
bent and his arrow on the string, as if aiming 
at the weathercock on the spire of the Old 
South." This Indian was carved by Deacon 
Shem Drowne, to whom, as the hero of 
one of Hawthorne's tales, allusion has been 
made. 

In earlier times than this the historic man- 
sion is to be seen in festival attire if we go with 
Captain Somerville, the Osbornes and Dr. 
Willard of The Rebels, who, walking out to wit- 
ness the celebration of the repeal of the stamp 
act, stop opposite the Province House to ex- 
amine the fanciful devices that had been pre- 
pared, in the eagerness of gratitude and joy. 
A full-length picture of Liberty hurling a 
broken chain to the winds particularly at- 
tracted their attention. Another picture of this 
interesting house we have in Mr. Chamber's 

266 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Cardigan when on a rainy night " the Gover- 
nor was giving a play and a supper to the 
wealthy Tory families of Boston and to all the 
officers of the British regiments quartered in 
the city. . . . The stony street echoed with the 
clatter of shod horses, the rattle of wheels, the 
shouts of footmen, and the bawling of chair- 
bearers. In the Province House fiddlers were 
fiddlinor , , . in the street we could hear them 
plainly and the sweet confusion of voices and a 
young girl's laughter." 

VI. IN TREMONT STREET AND 
MUSIC HALL 

DIRECTLY north of the Province 
House, and like it now demolished, 
stood in Tremont Street, at the cor- 
ner of Beacon, the Tremont House, where 
Thackeray, Dickens and other foreign notables 
stayed, and which, Dickens said, " had more 
galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages 
than he could remember or the reader 
would believe." He has left us a most 

267 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

amusing account of the first order he gave 
at this hotel : 

" Dinner, if you please," said I to the waiter. 

" When ? " said the waiter. 

" As quick as possible," said I. 

" Right away? " said the waiter. 

After a moment's hesitation I answered, " No," at 
a hazard. 

"Not right away?" cried the waiter, with an 
amount of surprise that made me start. 

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, " No ; I 
would rather have it in this private room. I like it 
very much." 

At this I really thought the waiter must have gone 
out of his mind ; as I believe he would have done but 
for the interposition of another man, who whispered 
in his ear, " Directly." 

u Well! and that's a fact ! " said the waiter, look- 
ing helplessly at me : " Right away." 

I saw now that " Right away " and " Directly " 
were one and the same thing. So I reversed my 
previous answer, and sat down to dinner ten minutes 
afterward ; and a capital dinner it was. 

John T. Trowbridge, in his novel Martin 
Merrivale, tells us that the hero had an unsat- 
isfactory meeting with his uncle at the Tre- 
mont House, while it is further invested with 

263 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

literary interest from the fact that in one of 
its private rooms were held, in the forties, the 
meetings of " The Jacobins' Club," humour- 
ously so dubbed by the literary men of which 
it was formed — radical thinkers and reform- 
ers, all of them. In literature these men, says 
a recent writer, " were essayists, ready to over- 
haul art, science, philosophy and theology 
with improved microscopes." 

The side windows of the Tremont House 
overlooked the Granary Burying-ground — a 
burial-ground, according to a Western hu- 
mourist, being " part and parcel of all Boston 
hotels." Bynner's hero, Sir Harry Frankland, 
attended the burial in the Granary ground of 
Mr. Peter Faneuil, and nearby is the grave of 
young Benjamin Woodbridge, beside which 
the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress mourned 
so sentimentally. " The grey squirrels," says 
the Autocrat, "were looking out for their 
breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in 
the light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was 
close to the rail of the burial-ground. He was 

269 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

on a grave with a broad blue slate stone at its 
head and a shrub growing on it. Stop before 




"Stop before we turn away and breathe a 
woman's sigh over poor Benjamin Woodbridge's 
dust. Love killed him, I think. . . . The 
Schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her 
hand, through the rails, upon the grave."— 
" The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.'" 

we turn away and breathe a woman's sigh over 
poor Benjamin Woodbridge's dust. Love killed 
him, I think. . . . The Schoolmistress dropped 

270 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

a rosebud she had in her hand, through the 
rails, upon the grave." In The Pagans of 
Arlo Bates we find Fenton, from one of the 
windows of his studio, admiring the tops of 
the trees of the old Granary ground opposite. 
This interesting burying-ground gets its name 
from the town granary which in the early days 
it surrounded. 

Across from here a little eastward stands 
Tremont Temple, to-day a new edifice in place 
of the one in which, in TJic Bostonians, Henry 
James writes: " The only thing that was still 
actual for Miss Birdseye was the elevation of 
the species by the reading of Emerson and 
the frequentation of Tremont Temple." And 
in another part of the novel he tells us that 
Verena Tarrant's mother had no higher ambi- 
tion for her daughter than she should marry a 
person connected with public life — which 
meant for Mrs. Tarrant that his name would 
be visible in the lamplight, on a coloured 
poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. 

To the initiated the place recalls the man, 
271 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

a musical eccentric, who under a thin disguise 
figures as Killings in Martin Mcrrivale. He 
made himself notorious in the Boston of his 
day by purchasing at auction in Tremont 
Temple the first ticket sold for Jenny Lind's 
concert, for which he paid the fabulous price 
of $625. This so roused public curiosity that 
his hitherto slimly attended concerts were 
crowded, and his seemingly reckless expendi- 
ture of money proved the good investment he 
intended. In speaking recently of this man — 
the prototype of Killings — Mr. Trowbridge 
said that many Bostonians would recall certain 
posters which flooded such shop windows as 
would take them during Jenny Lind's stay. 
Very large and highly coloured posters they 
were, representing a group of three figures — 
the central one, Jenny Lind, flanked by P. T. 
Barnum, her manager, in the act of presenting 
to her with a great flourish the man to whom 
her song was " beyond the dreams of ava- 
rice." In Martin Mcrrivale Killings also 
figured as publisher and editor of the Liter- 

272 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ary Portfolio, which existed in fact as the 
Literary Museum. 

Near Tremont Temple, with entrances in 
Hamilton place, School and Winter Streets, is 
the Music Hall, recently descended to the 
level of variety shows, but for many years a 
distinctive institution not to be overlooked by 
any novelist wishing to portray Boston faith- 
fully. " As all the world knows," says Henry 
James, in The Bostonians, " the opportunities in 
Boston for hearing good music are numerous 
and excellent, and it had long been Olive's 
practice to cultivate the best. She went in, as 
the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and 
in the high, dim, dignified Music Hall which 
has echoed in its time so much eloquence and 
so much melody, and of which the very propor- 
tions and colour seem to teach respect and at- 
tention, shed the protection of its illuminated 
cornice upon no faces more intelligently up- 
turned than those of Olive and Verena." 

This was the hall daringly engaged for 
Verena's debut, by Olive, who felt it was the 

273 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

only temple in which the votaries of their creed 
could worship. Brainy little Dr. Prance de- 
scribed the place as pretty big, but not so 
big as Olive Chancellor's ideas — ideas for 
the emancipation of her sex, destined to be 
ruthlessly crushed by the masculinity of the 
determined Basil Ransom. Who does not 
remember how, suddenly coming to Boston for 
Verena, her found her appearance in Music 
Hall immensely advertised. " As he gazed 
down the vista, the approach for pedestrians 
which leads out of Winter Street, he thought 
it looked expectant and ominous." And that 
night we know the impatient audience called 
in vain for Verena, who never made the great 
speech which was to liberate her sex from bon- 
dage, but was literally snatched bodily from 
the anteroom by her masterful lover, who dra- 
matically whirled her off to live for him in- 
stead of for the " cause." 

It was during a Symphony concert in Music 
Hall that Truth Dexter in the novel of that 
name, inwardly tortured by the thought that 

274 




275 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

her husband did not love her, was taken ill and 
rushed precipitately from the building. To 
these Saturday evening concerts accompanied, 
after he went blind, by the ever devoted Kate, 
came Dan Howard, whom Miss Frothingham 
makes appeal so tremendously to our sympa- 
thies in The Turn of the Road. As Mrs. 
Staggchase's guest (Arlo Bates's The Philis- 
tines) Miss Marrivale is taken to the concerts 
" where a handful of people gathered to hear 
the music, and all the rest of the world crowded 
for the sake of having been there." 

These concerts are always preceded by a pub- 
lic rehearsal on Friday afternoons, which, in 
Her Boston Experiences, Margaret Allison as- 
sures us no one enjoys, in the ordinary accep- 
tation of that term, but every one respects, 
exalts, bends the knee, imbibes — yea, even 
unto the state of worship known at Beyreuth. 
Another novelist, Eliza Orne White, in her 
clever portrayal of a typical young woman of 
the Hub, unhesitatingly declares that Mary 
(Miss Brooks) went to the rehearsals from a 

277 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

sense of duty mingled with a desire to see her 
friends. John Graham, whom she dragged 
along, owned frankly to himself that he went 
to see Mary. It was only Janet, of the Brooks 
family^ who really loved the music which " ex- 
alted her, and made her feel there was no 
heroic deed she could not do." Though the af- 
fair was called a lecture, in accordance with the 
time-honoured custom of Boston, Crawford 
would have us understand it was a political 
speech his hero, An American Politician, made 
there. In his audience was a little colony of 
Beacon Street. " It is not often that Beacon 
Street goes to such lectures, but John was one 
of themselves." 

In Tremont Street, only a few steps away 
from old Music Hall (the new one, called Sym- 
phony Hall, is out in Huntington Avenue), is 
the Studio Building, once the working place 
exclusively of artists, but now encroached upon 
by business in one form or another. Two of 
Arlo Bates's Pagans, Arthur Fenton and Tom 
Bently, had studios there, where in reality oc- 

278 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

curred, recently said Mr. Bates in discussing 
this novel, far more brilliant and original talk 
among the actual Pagans than is the imaginary 
conversation he makes for them. Bently's 
studio, says the novelist, was the envy of all 
his brother artists with its " stuffs from Algiers, 
rugs from Persia and Turkey ; weapons from 
Tripoli and India and Tunis ; musical instru- 
ments from Egypt and Spain ; antiques from 
Greece and Germany and Italy; and pottery 
from everywhere." Differing, but equally 
luxurious was Fenton's, where much that was 
dramatic in the book occurs. 



279 



ABOUT BOSTON 



I. CAMBRIDGE AND LEXINGTON 

SURROUNDING the Three-hilled City 
are what may some time become part 
of it, but now, and even more years 
ago, were communities having an independent 
existence, yet closely united to the metropolis. 
Dorchester Heights, historic as the command- 
ing eminence on which the Americans erected 
their batteries to drive the British fleet from 
the harbour, has become in these later days 
South Boston ; the pudding-stone region of 
Roxbury and the ancient Charlestown have 
joined as a part of the greater city, while 
Cambridge — "old Cambridge," as its many 
lovers fondly call it — remains an independent 
community. 

Our grandfathers tell us that before the 



2S 3 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

days of the railroads when communication was 
over the highways, the teamsters hauling 
freight to and from Boston were wont to 
spend the night at Cambridge or Roxbury 
before and after leaving the city, thereby en- 
abling them to appear in town in the very 
early morn as well as to make a fresh start at 
dawn well away from the cobble-stone pave- 
ment of the centre of business. Consequently 
at the " Neck " which connected Boston with 
Roxbury, at the west end of Cambridge bridge, 
and at a point on the Mill Dam where it inter- 
sected with a road to Brookline, there devel- 
oped such clusters of buildings as might be 
the natural growth of business from such a 
source. Small taverns surrounded by piazzas ; 
hup-e barns and stables which rambled off 
into a wilderness of open sheds ; blacksmith's 
shops with open doors, smoking forges, ring- 
ing anvils and stamping horses ; wheelwrights, 
harness makers, coopers and cobblers carrying 
on their trades in the humble frame buildings 
which were the homes of these artizans. Of 

284 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

such primitive little centres of business there 
are few traces to-day, but from them grew 
the closely built streets of Cambridge-port 
and the busy traffic of the extreme South 
End. 

The old Cambridge of colonial days forms 
the setting for Bynner's Penelopes Suitors. 
Penelope Pelham, who existed in fact as well 
as in fiction, was a charming young woman 
who came from the old England to the New 
in 1638 and married, under rather unusual cir- 
cumstances, Governor Bellingham. The nov- 
elist, in journalistic form, has her tell us that 
on landing she went "straightway to brother 
William's plantation at Cambridge, which is 
three miles and over from the town of Boston. 
He hath a large plantation and a fine house, 
with a troop of people, amongst which are sev- 
eral blackamoors." In the beautiful garden of 
this estate the Governor declared his love to 
Penelope, whose fiance, Buckley, made a dra- 
matic scene by appearing at an inopportune 
moment. Penelope was married to Governor 

2S5 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Richard Bellingham in 1641 and survived him 
many years, dying in Boston in 1 702. 

Another of Bynner's heroines, Agnes Surri- 
age. frequently went with Sir Harry Frank- 
land to Cambridge, and is quite as much iden- 
tified with Hobgoblin Hall, not far away — 
the finest estate of its time in New England. 
The grand old mansion, confiscated at the 
time of the Revolution, is still standing and 
well worth a trip to Medford to see. Agnes 
and the Collector, the novelist tells us, went 
there many a time to wait upon Mistress 
Penelope Royall. 

Fictional interest in Cambridge centres in 
and about Harvard Square, with a ramble 
westward as far as Mount Auburn. Of the 
University peopled with fictitious students 
whose haunts we wish to discover, much will 
be told in the following chapter. For the 
moment the town itself as the novelists have 
depicted it, occupies us. 

"Cambridge," says Mr. Pier in The Peda- 
gogues, " is romantic in much the same way as 




<-Z U 



5-d 









2? 7 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Rome is modern. One never really thinks 
of it being so, and yet it is. Rome is over- 
shadowed by its past : Cambridge is made op- 
pressively real by the proximity of Boston. 
Cambridge is, after all, not a city : it is a soul." 

The charming atmosphere of the old univer- 
sity town was strongly felt by Mrs. Harrison 
Gray Otis, who remarks in The Barclays of 
Boston, that the Gordons, fresh from the 
splendour and magnificence of foreign courts, 
preferred the quiet simplicity of a Cambridge 
life to the more pretentious one of a city. 
" There is an equality and evenness in the 
condition of all the society connected with the 
University which completely extinguishes all 
striving for what is perpetually in the mouths 
of our people." 

In his Suburban Sketches Mr. Howells gives 
many a delightful glimpse of rural Cambridge 
as he found it when he went there to live. " It 
was very quiet," he tells us. " We called one 
another to the window if a large dog went by 
our door ; and whole days passed without the 

289 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon 
our street, which flourished in flag weed and 
buttercups and daisies and in the autumn 
like the borders of nearly all the streets in 
Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of 
the succory." He dwells, too, on the climate, so , 
disagreeable in the winter, so lovely in the 
spring. " Then, indeed, Charlesbridge ap- 
peared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind 
blew all day from the southwest and all day in 
the grove across the way the orioles sang to 
their nestlings." The beauty and witchery of 
the Cambridge spring is a theme on which all 
the novelists writing of this locality wax elo- 
quent. 

Leading into Harvard Square is the avenue 
now called Massachusetts, the Cambridge 
residential part of which Henry James de- 
scribes in The Bostonians as a street " fringed 
on either side with villas offering themselves 
trustfully to the public. . . The detached 
houses had, on top, little cupolas and belve- 
deres, in front pillared piazzas — on either side 

290 







IS 



g ^ 






O *, p 



s,. 






291 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

a bow window or two, and everywhere an em- 
bellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices and 
wooden flourishes. They stood for the most 
part on small eminences lifted above the im- 
pertinence of hedge or paling, well up before 
the world with all the good conscience which in 
many cases came from a silvered number af- 
fixed to the Mass above the door." 

Off this avenue was the temporary lair of 
Dr. Tarrent {The Bosfouians), "a wooden cot- 
tage, with a rough front yard, a little naked 
piazza facing upon an unpaved road, in which 
the footway was overlaid with a strip of planks. 
These planks were embedded in ice or liquid 
thaw, according to the momentary mood of the 
weather, and the advancing pedestrian trav- 
ersed them in the attitude, and with a good 
deal of the suspense of a rope dancer." In 
Monadnoc Place a sightless, soundless, inter- 
spaced embryonic region was the dismal resi- 
dence of the mesmeric healer. 

Just beyond the college yard, northwestward 
in Garden Street, stands the historic old Christ 

293 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Church, the graveyard of which is of fictional 
interest as being the spot where Ralph 
(Cooper's Lionel Lincoln) under exciting and 
gruesome conditions, told Lionel the strange 
story of his parentage. " Thou hast reached 
the spot," dramatically announced the old man, 
" where moulder the bones of one who long 
supported thee. Unthinking boy, that sacri- 
legious foot treads on thy mother's grave." 
The rambler will look in vain for this fictitious 
grave, but there are many actual ones of inter- 
est, notably that of Madame Vassall who 
was one of the family whom Agnes and 
the Collector {Agnes Surriage) visited at 
Hobgoblin Hall. She lived in the man- 
sion now known as the Longfellow House, 
and the poet pays his tribute to the great 
lady : 

/// the village churchyard she lies. 
Dust in her beautiful eyes ; 

No more she breathes, nor feels, nor stirs ; 
At her feet and at her head 
Lies a slave to attend the dead. 

But their dust is as white as hers. 
294 




295 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Nearby, on what is now a part of the grounds 
of the Law School building, stood (until 1884) 
the ' gambrel-roofed house" which was the 
birthplace of the Autocrat, and in Revolution- 
ary days the headquarters of General Artemus 
Ward — where many stirring military incidents 
occurred. Lovingly and lengthily the Auto- 
crat writes of this house in A Mortal Antip- 
athy while everyone is familiar with his de- 
scription of it in his poem Parson TurrelFs 
Legacy. 

Know old Cambridge ? Hope you do — 
Born there t Don't say so.' I was too. 
(Born in a house with a ganibrel-roof, — 
Standing still, if you must have proof. — 
" Cambrel ? — Cambrel? " — Let me beg 
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, — 
First great angle above the hoof,— 
That's the gambrel ; hence gainbrel-roof.) 

One of his most famous poems, " Old Iron- 
sides," was written here. 

Across the way in Garden Street is the his- 
toric old Washington elm gazed upon with 
awe by Mr. Pier's pedagogues, and immortal- 

297 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 





'" Eighty years have passed, and more 
Since under the brave old tree 
Our fathers gathered in arms and swore 
They would follow the sign their banners bore, 
And fight till the land was free." 

— Holmes's "Under the Washington Elm." 



ized — like so much cist; of the old town which 
he loved — by the Autocrat. 

298 




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299 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

In this locality lived one summer two of 
The Pedagogues ', Jessie and Gorch, in a square 
brown house in which they had taken rooms. 
A vine-screened porch extending across the 
front of the house became the sta^e on which 
much of this serio-comic story was played. 
The Pedagogues in their hours of recreation 
made frequent excursions to hallowed scenes. 
We find them plucking sprigs from Longfel- 
low's hedsfe in front of the beautiful old man- 
sion and lingering in the park across the way 
— the field, now called Longfellow's garden, a 
memorial to the poet who during his lifetime 
kept it open that he might have an unobscured 
view of the landscape and the Charles River, 
which he loved and which winds in and out of 
so much of his verse. 

Thou hast taught me. Silent River, 

Many a lesson deep and long ; 
Thou hast been a generous giver ; 

I can give thee but a song. 

Beyond Longfellow's, in the same street, is 
the Brattle house, for a time the home of Mar- 

301 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

garet Fuller, while here roomed the historian 
and novelist Motley during his Harvard 
years. 

The Pedagogues also made pilgrimages to 
Elmwood, where, we are told, they derived a 
certain satisfaction from peering through the 
fence at Lowell's house. From here they 
found it but a short distance to Mount Auburn 
for a spear of grass from Longfellow's grave. 
Mr. Sanderson {The Barclays of Boston) was 
buried in Mount Auburn, where he reposed, 
the novelist says, in a lowly tomb amid bloom- 
ing flowers and cypress trees. In Mr. Bell- 
amy's Looking Backward we have a picture of 
this beautiful cemetery on Decoration Day 
when Julian West and the Bartletts went out 
there from Boston to " do honour to the mem- 
ory of the soldiers of the North who took part 
in the war for the preservation of the Union of 
the States. The survivors of the war, escorted 
by military and civic processions and bands of 
music, were wont on this occasion to visit the 
cemeteries and lay wreaths of flowers upon 

302 




■303 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

the graves of their dead comrades, the cere- 
mony being a very solemn and touching one." 
The beautiful avenue called Massachusetts 
which leads out from Cambridge through Ar- 
lington to Concord is richly historic and of in- 
terest to the fictional rambler, because over it 
marched Lincoln, Polworth and other of the red- 
coats on that memorable night when, far ahead 
of them, Paul Revere was spreading the alarm 

Through every Middlesex village and farm 
For the country-folk to be up and to arm. 

****** 

through the gloom and the light, 
The fate of a nation was riding that night. 

Such a scene appealed strongly to the im- 
agination of Hawthorne, who, in Sept i in us 
Fclton, tells us that " There were stories of 
marching troops coming like dreams through 
the midnight. Around the little rude meeting- 
houses there was here and there the beat of a 
drum and the assemblage of farmers with 
their weapons. So all that night there was 
marching, there was mustering, there was 

3"5 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

trouble ; and, on the road from Boston, a 
steady march of soldiers' feet onward, onward 
into the land whose last warlike disturbance 
had been when the red Indians trod it." 

On the westward road along which the red- 
coats marched is an old tavern known then 
and now as the Monroe Tavern — the head- 
quarters of Lord Percy. 

Hot Percy goad /lis slow artillery 
Up the Concord road, 

sings Lowell. This tavern is described by Mr. 
Howells in his volume called Three Villages. 

On Lexington Common, which is said to be 
as high as the top of Hunker Hill, Pitcairn's 
troop encountered the minute-men, and Lionel 
Lincoln, with beating heart, heard shouted by 
his major : 

"Disperse, ye rebels, disperse. Throw down your 
arms and disperse ! " 

These memorable words were instantly followed 
by the reports of pistols and the fatal mandate of 
"Fire '."when a loud shout arose from the whole 
body of soldiery, who rushed upon the open green 
and threw in a close discharge on all before them. 

306 




•507 




3 o8 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

"Great God!" exclaimed Lionel, "what is it ye 
do? Ye fire at unoffending men ! Is there no law 
but force ? Beat up their pieces, Polworth ; stop 
their fire." 

" Halt ! " cried Polworth, brandishing his sword 
fiercely among his men. " Come to an order, or I'll 
fell ye to the earth ! " 

But the excitement which had been gathering to a 
head for so many hours, and the animosity which 
had so long been growing between the troops and 
the people, were not to be repressed at a word. It 
was only when Pitcairn himself rode in among the 
soldiers, and, aided by his officers, beat down their 
arms, that the uproar was gradually quelled, and 
something like order was again restored. Before 
this was effected, however, a few scattering shots 
were thrown back from their flying adversaries, 
though without material injury to the British. 

When the firing had ceased, officers and men stood 
gazing at one another for a few moments, as if even 
they could foresee some of the mighty events which 
were to follow the deeds of that hour. The smoke 
slowly arose, like a lifted veil, from the green, and, 
mingling with the fogs of morning, drove heavily 
across the country, as if to communicate the fatal in- 
telligence that the final appeal to arms had been 
made. Every eye was bent inquiringly on the fatal 
green, and Lionel beheld, with a feeling allied to 
anguish, a few men at a distance writhing and strug- 

309 



FICTIONAL R A M BLES 

gling in their wounds, while some five or six bodies 
lay stretched upon the grass in the appalling quiet of 
death. Sickening at the sight he turned and walked 




LEXINGTON COMMON 

" When the firing had ceased, officers and men stood gazing at one 
another as if even they could foresee some of the mighty events which 
were to follow the deeds of that hour." — Cooper's "Lionel Lincoln." 

away by himself, while the remainder of the troops, 
alarmed by the reports of the arms, were eagerly 
pressing up from the rear to join their comrades. 

310 




THE LKXINGTON MINUTE MAN 



311 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

A granite stone marks this spot to-day, and 
nearby is Kitson's spirited statue of Captain 
John Parker, the Minute-man who said : 
" Stand your ground. Don't fire unless 
forced upon. But if they mean to have a war, 
let it begin here." 

Mr. Howells writes sympathetically of Lex- 
ington village — a little too far from Boston 
to be strictly suburban in aspect — where, he 
says, the local feeling is larger than the place. 
"As Dr. Holmes has remarked (Howells's 
Three Villages), American cities and villages 
like to think of themselves as the ' good old ' 
this and that ; but at Lexington, more than 
anywhere else out of Italy, I felt that the 
village was to its people the patrza." 

II. HARVARD 

WHEN we consider the University's 
place in published fiction, how small 
whatever we may discern is in com- 
parison with the vast jungle of romance it 
might furnish, if its yearly inpouring of our 

313 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES . 

youth could tell us of their hearts' desires and 
their rainbow castles ! 

Of Harvard in its infancy we learn some- 
thing from Penelope Pelham (Bynner's Penel- 
ope s Suitors ), who, seeing it in 1638, made 
note of it in her journal to this effect : " They 
have here set up a small school, which the)- 
call a college, and have made Herbert treas- 
urer thereof." About fifty years later Carew 
and Courtney (Stimson's King Noanett), jour- 
neying by canoe from Boston to Springfield, 
stopped at Cambridge to buy powder and then 
visited the college. " There was but one 
building; and on entering it we found no pro- 
fessors, but some eight or ten young fellows, 
and these were all the students ; and they 
were sitting around smoking tobacco, with the 
smoke of which the room was so full that you 
could hardly see ; and the whole house smelt 
so strong of it that when I was going up-stairs 
I said, ' This is certainly a tavern.' They could 
hardly speak a word of Latin. They took us 
to the library, where then- was nothing in par- 

3'4 



-IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

ticular. . . . Then they accompanied us down 
to the river to hail us off." 

Iu one of his novels (A Mortal Antipathy) 
Holmes comments on the great strides the 
University took about the middle of the last 
century. " During all my early years," he says, 
"our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and 
lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. 
Then all at once, like the statue in Don Gio- 
vanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall 
of that ' stony foot ' has effected a miracle like 
the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth 
which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the 
moose and the bear were wandering while 
Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few 
plain dormitories and other needed buildings 
were scattered about in my schoolboy days, 
groans under the weight of the massive edi- 
fices which have sprung up all around them." 

Many of the Boston novels touch upon 
Harvard life, notably Mr. Howells's April 
Hopes, Henry James's The Bostonians and 
Mr. Pier's The Sentimentalists; while the 

3' 5 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

hero of Mr. Wheelwright's A Child of the 
Century wrought for many years to obtain 
two pieces of parchment, which entitled him to 
write after his name, " Harvard, A.B., LL.B." 
But for fiction dealing more exclusively with 
the students we must turn to the pages of 
Fair Harvard, Hammersmith, Guerndale, 
and more recently The Prelude and the Play, 
Harvard Stories, Harvard Episodes, The 
Diary of a Freshman, The Pedagogues, and 
those two capital short stories, The Colligo 
Club Theatricals, Warren's The Girl and the 
Governor and Owen Wister's Philosophy 
Four. Rollds Journey to Cambridge, an 
amusing satire on the Rollo Books, should not 
be omitted from the list. 

Fair Harvard, published anonymously, is 
considered a faithful picture of life at the Uni- 
versity in the fifties and had a great vogue. 
So, too, had Hammersmith and Guerndale, 
which cover a somewhat later period. All 
three of these novels are read with interest to- 
day. The modern Harvard man (Flandrau 

316 




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Efl C 








b ^ 




a. <: 




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317 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

says there is no such thing as the " typical 
Harvard man") in various phases we find 
cleverly portrayed by Charles Macomb Flan- 
drau in Harvard Episodes and The Diary of 
a Freshman; similar " undergrads" make up 
Mr. Post's Harvard Stories. 

When " Uncle George" [Rolld s Journey to 
Cambridge) took Rollo to the University he 
told him that one of the Greatest benefits of a 
course at Harvard " was that derived from 
viewing the noble architectural specimens all 
around him." And though it was not intended 
Uncle George should be taken seriously, he 
undoubtedly was genuine in his admiration of 
buildings which are famous, and about which 
the novelists write with enthusiasm. 

The rambler who would seek out the haunts 
of fictional students would, naturally enough, 
upon arriving at Harvard Square turn toward 
the Yard as the beginning of his tour of inves- 
tigation. Passing through one of the beauti- 
ful memorial gates now in process of construc- 
tion, it is interesting to recall that at the time 

319 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

of which Henry James wrote in The Bostoni- 
ans the Yard was enclosed by means of a low 
rustic fence, " for Harvard," he says, " knows 
nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity 
of high walls and guarded gateways." This 
novelist then pictures the enclosure in the fol- 
lowing manner : " The Yard or college precinct 
is traversed by a number of straight little 
paths over which, at certain hours of the day 
a thousand undergraduates with books under 
their arms and youth in their step, flit from 
one school to the other. The rectangular 
structures of old red brick wore an expression 
of scholastic quietude, and exhaled a tradition, 
an antiquity." 

An atmosphere distinctly Cantabrigian we 
find in the opening chapters of a recent novel, 
The Prelude and the Play. The signature, 
Rufus Mann, is supposed to be the pseudonym 
of Mrs. Shaler, who, as the wife of Professor 
Shaler, is well qualified to know whereof she 
writes. She has slightly disguised her locality 
by calling the; town Canterbury, and man)' of 

320 







321 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

her characters are said to be drawn from per- 
sons well known in the University life. But 
this is so commonly said by the public that 
authors have ceased to be disturbed by it. 

Some of the people in The Prelude and the 
Play lived, we imagine, in Ouincy Street about 
where Professor Shaler's house stands, for the 
view the author describes is as seen from his 
windows. From the library Alexandra, the 
heroine, "looked out upon the college yard, 
which, with its spires, domes, towers and dor- 
mitories, in the gray, light, soft, enshrouding 
snow, seemed to her partial fancy to wear a 
look of stately conventual repose. And then, 
the bell ceasing to clan^, from out the lecture 
rooms crowds of men poured forth. These, 
falling more or less into professional ranks, 
clad in long ulsters caused her to think of 
bands of Benedictine monks ; only the frozen 
landscape forbade thethought of cheering vine- 
yards such as tradition affixes in sunnier lands 
to the monasteries of the accomplished order." 

All the; buildings connected with the Uni- 
323 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

versity were shown to Ransom by Verena 
( The Bostonians) when he went out to Cam- 
bridge to see her. He was greatly impressed 
by the Library, "a diminished copy of the 
chapel of King's College at the greater Cam- 
bridge." This is the library to which Felton 
(Hawthorne's Septimus Felton) came from 
Concord in search of scientific books relating 
to his studies. Herrick, in his story The Man 
Who Wins also alludes to it in speaking of 
one of his hero's ancestors. " The pastor's 
eloquence waxed into books that are found to- 
day on the shelves of the Harvard library, 
with the University book-plate recording their 
gift by the author." 

Some of the fictitious students are given 
rooms in the Yard, while as many others are 
not. Flandrau's men are not often found 
living there. George Talcott, the hero of 
The Prelude and the Play, roomed in the Yard, 
but the author does not tell us where ; Jack 
Randolph {Harvard Stories) roomed in 
Thayer ; his windows, we are told, commanded 

324 




s 



H .5 



•a 3 



325 



IN AND A B O U T B O S TON 

the approaches to Appleton Chapel, about 
which cluster many college traditions, in and 
out of fiction. 

Some Hammersmith fellows, Ayres and Van 
Courtland, of Fair Harvard, and the hero of 
April Hopes lived in Holworthy — "that old 
hall that keeps its favour with the students in 
spite of the rivalry of the newer dormitories." 
Here Mr. Howells shows us the interior of a 
student's room : " the deep window nooks and 
easy chairs upholstered in the leather that 
seems sacred alike to the seats and the shelves 
of libraries ; the aesthetic bookcases, low and 
topped with bric-a-brac ; the etchings and 
prints on the walls ; the foils crossed over the 
chimney, and the mantel with its pipes, 
and its photographs of theatrical celebrities 
tilted about over it — spoke of conditions 
foreign to Mrs. Pasmer's memories of Har- 
vard." 

Conspicuous in Hammersmith is Harvard 
Hall, " with its portraits of placid benefactors 
of the University smiling down upon many a 

327 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

lad floundering in an ebbing flood of classics, 
and consuming his pencil in despair." 

Beside Harvard is Massachusetts, also a re- 
citation hall, which, like Sever, is identified 
with the scenes of Mr. Pier's inimitable novel 
The Pedagogues, wherein he presents a young 
instructor wrestling with the raw (and exas- 
perating) material of a class in English compo- 
sition and literature in the summer school. In 
and about these halls the rambler will find their 
prototypes any midsummer day. From the 
South and West come most of these actual 
students — gray-haired women, many of them, 
who expect their instructors — to quote Mr. 
Pier, " in six short weeks to purge them of 
provinciality, to give them a catholic appre- 
ciation of literature, to instruct them in new 
methods of teaching, and to teach them to 
write — to write — to write. . . ' My object in 
coming here ' " (said a fictitious one, and it is 
the sentiment of most of the actual students) 
" ' is to learn to be a writer of fiction, preferably 
strong and passionate. I am familiar with the 

32s 




S - 



s 






3 I 



329 



IN AND ABOUT BOS I O N 

works of Shakespeare, Byron, Ouida and E. 
I'. Roc. I know no other language than my 
own.' " 

It has been conjectured that the experiences 
of the most satirical of instructors, Alfred 
Honore Palantine, were those of his creator, 
Mr. Pier. This, however, is not the case, as 
Mr. Pier, though a Harvard man, never taught 
there. 

Between Massachusetts and Harvard Halls 
is the Tree so prominent in all the Class-day 
festivities, and to which full justice has been 
done by all the hedonists who find this fete 
day an inspiring theme. " What short descrip- 
tion can do justice to it !" exclaims the author 
of Hammersmith, and Mr. Howells, in a suc- 
cession of charming photographs, devotes to it 
the first seven chapters of April Hopes* One 
of Mr. Flandrau's characters, Beverly Beverly 
(A Class Day Idyl ), has a class-day unique, 
we imagine, in college annals. 

In continuing through the Yard on our way 
to Memorial Hall, we pass the College Pump, 

331 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

" in warm weather," says a recent writer, "one 
of the hardest-worked of all the college belong- 
ings." It is affectionately alluded to by the 
novelists, and we half expect to find Hammer- 
smith's face under its mouth, "where he had 
cooled his lips so many times, rushing in from 
cricket, or football, or rapid constitutional, just 
in time for recitation." 

Passing out through the Yard to Cambridge 
Street we come to Memorial Hall, elaborately 
described and scenically used in all the stories 
pertaining to Harvard life. In writing of the 
impression that this building made on his Mis- 
sissippian hero of The Boston ia us, Henry James 
says : 4i The Hall was buttressed, cloistered, 
turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had 
never seen anything ; though it didn't look 
old, it looked significant ; it covered a larofe 
area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. 
It was detached from the rest of the collegiate 
group, and stood in a grassy triangle of its 
own." 

Here, in Sander's Theatre, fictional heroes 
332 






IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

deliver their orations and receive their degrees, 
while Memorial itself on Class-day becomes 
the scene of gay festivities in the way of 
spreads and dances. This Hall was erected in 
memory of the sons of Harvard who died 
during - the civil war. In Hammersmith we 
are given pictures of those stirring times when 
the students went off to the front amid the 
cheers and blessing's of their classmates. At 
the end of this novel the author, writing in 
1877, says: "Yonder Memorial Hall has writ- 
ten the names of some on its immortal tablets, 
where the thronging youth of to-day, who come 
up annually to the old university, may read 
the bright record and the brightening names. 
The lives of these will not have been in vain 
if they shall teach their successors in the 
happy college walks and ways, consecrated 
by their heroic feet, that courage, high dar- 
ing, devoted sacrifice of self, are not alone 
to be admired among the ancient Greeks and 
Romans." 

How some of these '' successors " of Ham- 
333 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

mersmith and his friends feel about the beau- 
tiful Hall is suggested with exquisite feeling 
by Mr. Flandrau in his story Wellington. 
Haydock, it will be remembered, was taking 
his mother into Memorial. 

The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the 
sunlight outside. Then it lifted straight and high 
from the cool dusk into the quiet light of the 
stained windows. Except for the faint echo of 
their footsteps along the marble floor, the two 
moved from tablet to tablet in silence. Somewhere 
near the south door they stopped, and Phillip said, 
simply : 

" This one is Shaw's." 

When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade 
on the steps, Haydock's mother wiped her eyes. 
The long, silent roll-call always made her do that. 

" It was a great, great price to pay," she said at 
last. 

" I never knew how great," said Phillip, " until I 
came here one day and tried to live it all over, as if 
it were happening now. Before then the war seemed 
fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. 
It's been real since then. I thought of how all the 
little groups of fellows would talk about it in the 
Yard between lectures, and read the morning papers 
while the lectures were going on ; and how the in- 
structors would hate to have to tell them not to. 

334 




335 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

And I thought what it would be like to have 
the men I know . . . getting restless and excited, and 
sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing 
down their books and marching away to the front to 
be shot ; and how I would have to go along, too, be- 
cause — well, you couldn't stay at home while they 
were being shot every day and thrown into trenches. 
I don't think you ever realize it very much until you 
think about it that way. . . . But it isn't as though 
you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did some- 
thing great ; it's doing something now. It can never 
stop, for every year the new ones come — the ones 
who don't know yet." 

Strolling- from Memorial clown Kirtland we 
come to Divinity Avenue, at the end of which 
is Divinity Hall, where Saulsbury and Hamil- 
ton {Fair Harvard) lived, "in secure retreat 
from the world, devoting themselves to study in 
monastic seclusion. . . . Divinity Hall was built 
at a time when funereal gloom was deemed 
essential for the perfect development of the 
Christian character." Verena Tarrent {The 
Bostonians) knew young men who were study- 
ing for the Unitarian ministry in that "queer 
little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue.' 

337 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

From here we retrace our steps across the 
Yard to the Square and thence down Lin- 
den Street to the corner of Mount Auburn, 
where we find Claverly, in which lived Sears 
Walcott 2nd, Haydock, Fields, Hewitt and 
other of the men of Mr. Flandrau's Harvard 
Episodes. Many events — comedy and tragedy 
intermingled — occurred in Claverly, among 
these men who are clever pen portraits of the 
Harvard men of to-day. This fictionist deals 
frankly with the varying aspects of Harvard 
life about which, as presented by him, the un- 
initiated will learn much, particularly from the 
discussion which takes place in that story 
called The Chance. 

Around the corner from Claverly in Holyoke 
Street is the Hasty Pudding Club House, the 
scene of one of Mr. Post's Harvard stories — 
In the Early Sixties. At this club house 
Beverly Beverly (Flandrau's The Class Day 
Idyl) spent a wretched quarter of an hour en- 
deavouring to escape from his ridiculous en- 
tanglement with that clinging tormentor, " the 

338 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Millstone." Hammersmith and Goldie were 
Pudding men in the days when the club rooms 
were in Stoughton Hall, up the stairway of 
which "legions of trembling neophytes have 
climbed before and since." 

III. WESTWARD 

FROM Beacon Street in Boston, extend- 
ing westward, some fifteen years or more 
aQfo, was a famous road called the Mill- 
dam (now the Beacon Street Boulevard), 
where lovers of horseflesh were wont to display 
the points of their favourites and fast trotting 
was the order of the day. During the winter, 
in the sleighing season, it became what Bartley 
Hubbard (Howells's The Rise of Silas Lap- 
ham) called a carnival of fashion and gaiety 
on the Brighton road to make a part of which 
was one of the keenest enjoyments of Colonel 
Lapham. Not that the "carnival of fashion" 
appealed to him, but the excitement of speed- 
ing his mare was a sensation of which he never 
wearied. 

339 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

The Milldamof those days is thus pictured for 
us by the novelist : "The beautiful landscape 
widened to right and left of them, with the sun- 
set redder and redder, over the low irregular 
hills before them. They crossed the Milldam 
into Longwood ; and here, from the crest of 
the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in 
which thousands of cutters came and went. 
Some of the drivers were already speeding 
their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner 
lines, between the slowly moving vehicles on 
either side of the road. . . But most of the 
people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had 
so little the air of the great world that one 
knowing it at all must have wondered where 
they and their money came from ; and the 
gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed, like 
that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim, almost 
fierce alertness; the women wore an air of cou- 
rageous apprehension. At a certain point the 
Colonel said, ' I'm going to let her out, Pert,' 
and he lifted and then dropped the reins lightly 
on the mare's back. She understood the signal 

34" 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

and, as an admirer said, 'she laid down to her 
work.' Nothing in the immutable iron of Lap- 
ham's face betrayed his sense of triumph as the 
mare left everything behind her on the road. 
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy 
holding her flying wraps about her, and shield- 
her face from the scud of ice flung from the 
mare's heels to betray it ; except for the rush 
of her feet, the mare was as silent as the peo- 
ple behind her ; the muscles of her back and 
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some 
mechanism responding to an alien force, and 
she shot to the end of the course, grazing a 
hundred encountered and rival sledges in her 
passage, but unmolested by the policemen, 
who probably saw that the mare and the Colo- 
nel knew what they were about, and, at any 
rate, were not the sort of men to interfere with 
trotting 1 like that. At the end of the heat 
Lapham drew her in, and turned off on a side 
street into Brookline." 

The Colonel was then in the vicinity of the 
present Country Club, built since his day in 

341 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Brookline, and the scene of much of Arlo 
Bates's Love in a Chad. Here the inconse- 
quential Jack Neligage — one of the few men in 
Boston, the novelist says, entirely free from any 




COUNTRY CLUB, BROOKLINE 

" Before the front of the house was a sloping lawn which merged 
into an open park, here and there dotted with groups of budding 
trees." — Arlo Bates 's lt Love in a Cloud." 



weakness in the way of occupation beyond that 
of pleasure-seeking — played polo, a game in 
which he excelled. All the characters in this 
novel were polo enthusiasts or pretended to be! 
and the Country Club, dubbed by Mr. Bates 
" County Club," during the weeks of early 

342 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

spring was a popular rendezvous. " The exhil- 
aration of the spring clay, the pleasure of tak- 
ing up once more the outdoor life of the warm 
season, the little excitement which belongs to 
the assemblage of merry-makers, the chatter, 
the laughter, all the gay bustle combined to fill 
the County Club with a joyous atmosphere." 
Brookline, the most aristocratic and by many 
regarded as the most beautiful of the environs 
of Boston, was the home of that mysterious 
and unique individual Mr. Austin May (Stim- 
son's Residuary Legatee), who, driving to his 
house on his arrival from Europe, noted that 
"the road was walled in and roofed over by a 
dense canopy of foliage borne by arching 
American elms ; and through its green walls, 
dense as a lane in Jersey, only momentary 
glimpses were to be had of shaven lawns and 
quiet country houses. When they came to a 
gate, with high stone posts, topped by an 
ancient pair of cannon balls, the carryall turned 
in. A moment after they had passed the 
screen of border foliage, May found himself in 

343 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

the midst of a wide lawn, open to the sunlight, 
but rimmed upon all points of the compass by 
a distant hedge of trees. . . In the centre of 
this stood an elderly brick house, its southern 
wall quite green with ivy. In front of it was a 
large pavilion low and stone built, rising with- 
out apparent purpose from the side of an ar- 
tificial pool of water, rimmed with rich bands 
of lilies." How Austin May and May Austin 
came to dwell together in the old ivy-covered 
house, must be left to the novelist to tell. Un- 
fortunately in the book he does not aid us 
by mention of exact locality to identify the 
house, yet he assures us that if we drive by 
there, some summer afternoon, we will " note 
about the windows those frilled and pleated 
things that denote the presence of a woman's 
hand." 

Out through these country roads tramped 
Dan, led by Walter (Miss Frothingham's The 
Turn of the Road) on that hideous night when 
he went blind. "He was maddened with 
physical pain that did not subside with the 

344 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

loss of sight, and after the long strain of 
sleepless nights and mental anguish his nerves 
had given way. He lurched heavily in walk- 




THE UPPER CHARLES RIVER — 

"where the reflections of its wooded banks 
and circuitous loveliness remind one of the 
Thames above Richmond." — Margaret All- 
s ton's "Jfer Boston Experiences." 

inof, and blamed Walter for letting hj m stum- 
ble, and there were terrible times when he 
fought for the light with his hands, as a drown- 
ing man fights for air. At those moments 
Walter held him with all his strength and with 

345 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

a prayer on his lip. The night seemed an 
aeon of chaotic and hideous darkness. It was 
not till the East grew pale that Dan allowed 
himself to be forced upon a bench, and, leaning 
his head against a tree behind him, fell into 
the unconsciousness of utter exhaustion." 

Beyond the scene of this tragedy lie the 
Newtons (called the Garden City) where the 
beautiful Charles and a large canoe club fur- 
nish boating for hundreds of pleasure-seekers. 
There Margaret Alston {Her Boston Experi- 
ences) canoed on the upper Charles, "where 
the reflections of its wooded banks and cir- 
cuitous loveliness remind one of the Thames 
above Richmond." 

IV. TOWARD THE BLUE HILLS 

HAVING raced over the Milldam with 
Silas Lapham, an exhilarating sleigh- 
ride in another direction is open to 
those who will drive with Craighead and his 
wife ( Truth Dexter) " through Boston's circle 
of clinging parks, Jamaica Plain, Dedham and 

346 



I N AND ABOUT B O S T O N 

Milton, embracing the lofty ledges of the Blue 
Hills and the heights of Dorchester, where 
Washington had erected his decisive batteries. 
. . . Truth felt new life tingle in her veins as 
she and her husband sped along the shining, 
slippery roads, the black span under Van's 
masterly control gradually passing every rival 
equipage, and the keen sleigh rails throwing 
showers of hardened snow into the air at 
every turn or swerve." 

The heights of Dorchester which thev 
passed homeward bound are identified with 
Cooper's Lionel Lincoln, who, with Cecil, 
aided by Ralph, escaped from here to Boston 
under the fire of Washington's batteries. 
" Ralph led his companions by a long and 
circuitous path to the shores of the bay. Here 
they found, hid in the rushes of a shallow inlet, 
a small boat that Lionel recognized as the lit- 
tle vessel in which job Pray was wont to pur- 
sue his usual avocation of a fisherman. Enter- 
ing it without delay, he seized the oars, and 
aided by a flowing tide, he industriously urged 

347 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

it towards the distant spires of Boston. The 
parting shades of the night were yet struggling 
with the advance of day, when a powerful flash 
of light illuminated the hazy horizon, and the 
roar of cannon, which had ceased toward 
morning", was heard again. But this time the 
sound came from the water, and a cloud arose 
above the smoking harbour, announcing that 
the ships were again enlisted in the contest. 
This sudden cannonade induced Lionel to steer 
his boat between the islands ; for the castle and 
southern batteries of the town were all soon 
united in pouring out their vengeance on the 
labourers, who still occupied the heights of 
Dorchester. . . In short, while he laboured at 
the oars, Lionel witnessed the opening scene of 
Breed's acted anew, as battery after battery, 
and ship after ship, brought their guns to bear 
on their hardy countrymen, who had once 
more hastened a crisis by their daring enter- 
prise." 

Dorchester is commonly known as the pud- 
ding-stone district because of the vast amount 

34s 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

of loose boulder cast about. The legends of 
the pudding-stone are legion. The Autocrat 
gives one, and his version of it in a poem 
called "The Dorchester Giant" in which his 
inimitable humour has full sway. He says that 
a ofiant of old grave to his wife and children a 
pudding stuffed with plums which in their 
rage they flung over all the country round 
about : 

Giant and mammoth have passed away. 

For ages have floated by ; 
The suet is hard as a marrow-bone, 
And every plum is turned to a stone, 

But there the puddings lie. 

And if some pleasant afternoon, 

You'll ash me out to ride. 
The whole of the story I will tell. 
And you shall see where the puddings fell 
And pay for the pun eh beside. 

In Roxbury, which adjoins Dorchester, 
is standing in Eustis Street what remains 
of the stately old mansion which, nearly a 
century and a half ago, was the abode of 
Governor Shirley, one of the most dis- 

349 



F I C T I O N A L R A M BLES 

tinguished ot the royal governors. Then it 
stood remote from the highway with a com- 
manding view of the sea, the distant town and 
surrounding country, perched upon its granite 
foundation, and approached by an impossible 
flight of granite steps. Here many of the 
scenes of the earlier chapters of Bynner's 
Agnes Surriage transpire. Mrs. Shirley, a 
most gracious woman, interested herself in 
Frankland's protegee from the beginning and 
gave her at once the inestimable advantage of 
her patronage. After the " bare-legged dis- 
hevelled little hussev " had taken on some 
polish we have in the novel a charming account 
of a musical party here when Agnes was per- 
suaded to sing several ballads to her own ac- 
companiment on the harpsichord. " Even Mrs. 
Shirley and the Collector, who were aware of 
her vocal powers, were astonished at the per- 
formance ; while as for Captain Frankland, 
who shared his brother's musical taste, it 
was noted that for the rest of the evening 
he did not quit the singer's side, and on 

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IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

breaking up was a long time in making his 
adieux." 

Though Kingshaven in Eliza Orne White's 
Miss Brooks, is not intended to be Roxbury, 
yet here is the beautiful old-fashioned garden 
described as the Brookses where the family 
spent so much time, Janet particularly. And 
there, one beautiful moonlight night, Graham 
found her sobbing her heart out. " The o^ai-den 
had an aspect of romance and mystery in this 
half light in striking contrast to its appearance 
under a midday sun. The carnations and the 
late roses were etherealized, and a tall bush 
with a feathery white flower made a delicate 
frost-work with its graceful branches. There 
was a touch of fog in the air which brought 
out a mixture of sweet odours." 

Beyond Roxbury is Jamaica Plain, where 
Mrs. Sam Wyndham (Crawford's American 
Politician) gave her skating party on Jamaica 
Pond. " The water was covered with a broad 
sheet of ice that would bear any weight. . . . 
Two and two, in a certain grace of order, the 

353 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

little party came out from the shore into the 
moonlight. A very pretty sight is a moonlight 
skating party, and Vancouver knew what he 
was saying when he hinted at the mysterious 
and romantic influences that are likely to be 




H» MA' 




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JAMAICA POND 

" — the water was covered with a broad sheet of ice that would 
bear any weight." — Crawford* s "An American Politician." 

abroad on such occasions." Mr. Crawford 
comments on the fact that skating was not at 
that time fashionable in Boston, so that the 
Wyndham party had the pond practically to 
themselves. This would not be their expe- 
rience to-day, when all during the skating sea- 
son it is crowded to its utmost capacity, day 
and evening. 



354 







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355 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Keeping on toward the Blue Hills we come 
to Wallaston, a part of Quincyand of fictional 
interest because here is Mount Wallaston, the 
scene of the revels of Hawthorne's Maypole 
of Merrymount and of Motley's Merry mount, 
the latter story being one of the two novels 
written by the historian. 

About 1628 one Captain Wallaston had 
planted himself in the neighbourhood of the 
hill, which still perpetuates his name. Thomas 
Morton, the wily, overthrew him and made 
himself Lord of Merry-Mount, as he named 
the place. Says the novelist : " The crepuscu- 
lar period which immediately preceded the rise 
of the Massachusetts Colony possesses more 
of the elements of romance than any sub- 
sequent epoch. After the arrival of Winthrop 
with the charter, the history of the province is 
as clear as daylight, but during the few previ- 
ous years there are several characters flitting 
like phantoms through the chronicles of the 
time the singularity of whose appearance 
gives them a certain romantic interest." Such 

357 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

a character is Motley's hero, Morton, the Lord 
of Misrule and Sachem of Merrymount, who is 
also the hero of Hawthorne's story, The May- 
pole of Merry Mount. 

In this tale, written before Motley's novel, 
but which, the novelist - historian tells us, he 
took pains never to read, Hawthorne has 
painted for us fantastic facts without need to 
draw upon his wealth of imagery. The masques, 
mummeries and festive customs which made 
the revels of the nuptials of the Lord and 
Lady of the May as he describes them, were 
in accordance with the manners of the aofe. 
"All the hereditary pastimes of old England 
were transplanted hither," he tells us. " The 
King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the 
Lord of Misrule bore potent sway. On the 
eve of St. John they felled whole acres of the 
forest to make bonfires, and danced by the 
blaze all night, crowned with garlands and 
throwing flowers into the flame. At harvest- 
time, though their crop was of the smallest, 
they made an image with the sheaves of 

353 










35<; 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Indian corn and wreathed it with autumnal 
garlands, and bore it home triumphantly. 
But what chiefly characterized the colonists of 
Merry Mount was their veneration for the 
Maypole. It has made their true history a 
poet's tale. Spring decked the hallowed em- 
blem with young blossoms and fresh green 
boughs; summer brought roses of the deepest 
blush, and the perfected foliage of the forest ; 
autumn enriched it with that red and yellow 
gorgeousness, which converts each wildvvood 
leaf into a painted flower ; and winter silvered 
it with sleet, and hung it round with icicles till 
it flashed in the cold sunshine, itself a frozen 
sunbeam. Thus each alternate season did 
homage to the maypole, and paid it a tribute 
of its own richest splendour. Its votaries danced 
round it, once, at least, in every month ; some- 
times they called it their religion, or their altar ; 
but always, it was the banner staff of Merry 
Mount" 

In Quincy, of which Wallaston is a part, is a 
pleasure-ground called Merrymount, after the 

361 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

home of the Lord of Misrule; but to the 
fictional rambler Ouincy's most interesting 
landmark is the historic Quincy-Butler man- 
sion, haunted by memories of the bewitching 
Agnes Surriage, one of the gayest of the 
guests in a" country excursion to Mr. Ouincy's, 
where the whole part)' with much merriment 
took part in catching eels they were to have 
cooked for supper from the brook at the bot- 
tom of the garden." Like the house the brook 
is still there, and beside it many times, no 
doubt, sat the celebrated " Dorothy O.," who 
was born in the mansion. She, as all the world 
knows, was the great-grandmother of the Auto- 
crat who, justly proud of her, has added to 
her laurels by this poem dedicated to her 
portrait : 

Dorothy Q. was a lady born ! 
Ay ! si ncr the galloping Normans came 
England's annals have known her name ; 
And still to the three-hilled rebel town 

Dear is that ancient name s renown ; 
For many a civic wreath they won, 

The youthful sire and the grey-haired son. 
362 




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363 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Farther on toward the Blue Hills we find 
Dedham. "And this (Stimson's King Noa- 
nett) was the settlement they called Content- 
ment, for the Bay people were fond of fine 
names, taken from the Bible or their books of 
Psalms." Most of this country (about 1670) 
was then a wilderness and the adventures of 
Carew and Courtenay, in their endeavour to 
make a home, and their encounters with, the 
Indians, make a stirring and romantic picture 
of times little known to the fiction reader until 
Mr. Stimson created King Noanett. 

V. NAHANT AND NANTASKET 

OF the many shore places about Boston 
one of the most beautiful and exclu- 
sive is Nahant, on the north shore, 
an island but for the narrow strip of land that 
connects it with Lynn. " Cold roast Boston," 
it was named by " Tom " Appleton, celebrated 
as a wit of the Hub. "Tom" Appleton has 
been gathered to his fathers, but his nickname 
still clings. In Truth Dexter ; the novelist 

365 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

tells us that Craighead was most anxious to 
send his wife down there when the warm 
weather came on, but " Truth feared the pen- 
insular resort, having heard it spoken of by 
epicures as 'cold roast Boston.'' 

In this aristocratic atmosphere it is natural 




'.' At the foot of the lawn was the cliff; and below, a lovely little 
pebble beach covered with the most wonderful shells." — SHmson's 
"Pirate Gold" 

to find old Mr. Bowdoin (Stimson's Pirate 
Gold) spending his summers, and it is interest- 
ing to learn that these summers and all the 
happy days in them he made for the children 
are described in the novel as they actually oc- 
curred in the life of Mr. Bowdoin's prototype, 
Mr. Josiah Bradlee. Mercedes, "who came 
from the sea," never forgot those visits to 

366 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

Nahant, when, as the steamer reached the 
wharf, Mr. Bowdoin could be seen usually " run- 
ning- down the hill as if too late, his blue dress 
coat tails streaming" in the wind, his Panama 
hat in one hand, and a large brown paper 
bag, bursting with oranges, in the other." 
In his capacious pockets the children were 
sure to find Salem " Gibraltars," hard and 
mouth-filling dainties calculated to fill in- 
fantile mouths even as they did the hearts 
with joy. 

When the little visitors arrived at the house 
they were sent out to play on " a fascinating 
rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of 
twenty yards of pebbles " where they made the 
most wonderful discoveries. Real candy 
crystals, pink and white, had been washed into 
the rocky crevices ! Real bunches of hot house 
grapes grew on the low juniper bushes ! Real 
peg tops and beautiful, rare shells were to be 
found among the seaweed on the tiny beach ! 
Verily a good fairy was that old gentleman, 
stretched in a roomy cane chair up on the 

367 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

piazza, in his hand a spy glass with which he 
pretended to scan the horizon. 

The house on the outer cliff high above the 
sea where the lovable and eccentric old Mr. 
Bowdoin passed his summer days, is still stand- 
ing, and remains in the possession of the Brad- 
lee family. 

The Coreys (Howells's The Rise of Silas 
Lapliam) always had a house at Nahant, but 
after letting it for a season or two they found 
they could get on without it. The people of 
Mr. Howells's A Days Pleasure had in mind 
an excursion to Nahant, but they gave the 
preference to Nantasket because they thought 
it much better to see the ocean from a loner 
beach, than from the Nahant rocks. Of all 
these splendid rocks which make the shore so 
picturesque, the most imposing is Pulpit at the 
extreme point of the estate of Mr. Henry 
Cabot Lodge, whom many persons persist in 
proclaiming the author of that recent and 
much discussed anonymous Boston novel 
Truth Lexter. Another Boston literateur who 

368 




3f>9 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

makes Nahant his summer home is Judge 
Robert Grant, as a novelist most widely known 
through his Unleavened Bread. 

The poet Longfellow was for many years a 
picturesque figure in the summer life of Nahant, 
where his sunset reveries were made a " re- 
quiem of the dying day " by the ringing of the 
bells in Lynn. 

Borne on the evening wind across the crimson twilight 
O'er land and sea they rise and fall, bells of Lynn. 

In a social sense as widely separated from 
Nahant as are the poles is Nantasket, only a 
few miles away, and a part of summer Boston. 
In Mr. Howells's A Day's Pleasure the party 
went on one of the steamers down the harbour 
to this Mecca of tourists, but gave up their ex- 
pedition to the beach owing to the sudden ap- 
pearance of an east wind. " While you are 
saying how lovely it is, a subtle change is 
wrought, and under skies still blue and a sun 
still warm the keen spirit of the east wind 
pierces every nerve, and all the fine weather 
within you is chilled and extinguished." 

371 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 



The Silas Laphams spent many summers at 
Nantasket, and Mr. Howells has given us vivid 
pictures of their surroundings and the trip 
down to the beach on the boat — a trip fami- 
liar to Bostonians and the summer tourist in the 
Hub. The fiction reader will find it immensely 
diverting to make this little water journey 
down the harbour in the society of Colonel 
Lapham as young Corey so often did. "He 
had time," says the author, " to buy two news- 
papers on the wharf before he jumped on board 
the steamboat with Corey. 'Just made it,' he 
said ; ' and that's what I like to do. I can't 
stand it to be aboard much more than a min- 
ute before she shoves out.' He gave one of 
the newspapers to Corey as he spoke, and set 
him the example of catching up a camp stool 
on their way to that point on the boat which 
his experience had taught him was the best. 
He opened his paper at once and began to run 
over the news, while the young man watched 
the spectacular recession of the city, and was 
vaguely conscious of the people about him, 

372 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

and of the gay life of the water around the 
boat. The air freshened ; the craft thinned in 
number ; they met larger sail, lagging slowly 
inward in the afternoon light; the islands of 
the bay waxed and waned as the steamer ap- 
proached and left them behind." It was al- 
ways a matter of astonishment to the Colonel 
where the great crowd of people on the boat 
came from. " I've been riding up and down 
on these boats for six or seven years," he said 
to Corey, " and I don't know but very few of 
the faces I see on board. Seems to be a per- 
fectly fresh lot every time. Well, of course ! 
Town's full of strangers in the summer season, 
anyway, and folks keep coming down from the 
country. They think it's a great thing to get 
down to the beach, and they've all heard of 
the electric light on the water, and they want 
to see it." The author goes on to tell us that 
there was little style and no distinction among 
the crowd. " They were people who were 
Sfoin? down to the beach for the fun or the re- 
lief of it, and were able to afford it. In face 

373 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

they were commonplace, with nothing but the 
American poetry of vivid purpose to light them 
up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But 
the were nearly all shrewd and friendly-look- 
ing, with an apparent readiness for the humour- 
ous intimacy native to us all. The women 
were dandified in dress, according to their 
means and taste, and the men differed from 
each other in degrees of indifference to it. To 
a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in 
summer, no sort of dignity is possible. We 
have not even the power over observers which 
comes from the fantasticality of an English- 
man when he discards the conventional dress. 
In our straw hats and our serge or flannel 
sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd 
of boys." 

From the pier, where the boat lands, it is 
but a short drive up the sandy road past the 
hotels and restaurants to the colony of summer 
houses, one of which was occupied by the 
Laphams — "a brown cottage with a vermilion 
roof and a group of geraniums clutching the 

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375 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

rock that cropped up in the loop formed by 
the road. It was treeless and bare all round, 
and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered 
away a little more than a stone's cast from the 
cottage." Here at the Colonel's solicitation 
young Corey came frequently to see " the 
girls," with whom he spent delightful evenings 
on the veranda in the moonlight, on the rocks, 
and on the beach which they were much given 
to frequenting, though Penelope confided to 
him that they had about exhausted its possi- 
bilities. "We have been here so often 
that we know it all by heart — just how it 
looks at high tide, and how it looks at low 
tide, and how it looks after a storm. We're as 
wellacquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly- 
fish as we are with the children digging in the 
sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. 
I think they're always the same, all of them." 
It was the winsome Penelope, it will be re- 
membered, who captivated Corey, while the 
fam il y _and Irene, alas '.— thought it was the 
younger girl's beauty that attracted him. 



377 



FICTIONAL RAMBLES 

Nantasket forms part of the setting of Mr. 
Stimson's Pirate Gold. At the period of 
which this novelist writes it was semi-fashion- 
able and our old friend Jamie McMurtagh, 
the hero of the novel, socially ambitious for 
his little Mercedes, felt that he had achieved 
ereat things when he rented a cottage at this 
gay watering-place. "To Jamie it was the 
next thing to Nahant, which was of course out 
of the question. But the queer old clerk was 
not fitted to shine in any society, and Merce- 
des found it hard to make her way alone. 
They wandered about the beach, and occa- 
sionally to the great hotel where there was a 
hop, of evenings, and listened to the bands ; 
but Mercedes' beauty was too striking and 
her manners were too independent to inspire 
quick confidence in the Nantasket matrons ; 
while Jamie missed his pipe and shirt-sleeves 
after supper." Jamie's only other experience 
of Nantasket was once years before when he 
had gone there on a week's vacation, but the 
outing could scarcely have enlightened him as 

373 



IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 

to the attractions of the place, for " his princi- 
pal diversion had been to take the morning- 
steamboat thence to the city, and gaze into 
the office windows from the wharf." 

Mercedes' isolation, however, finally came 
to an end and her and Jamie's real troubles 
began when she met at the Rockland House 
Mr. David St. Clair who " wore kid gloves and 
a high silk hat — a white waistcoat and a very 
black moustache. . . His career was shadowy, 
like his hair. In those days still a moustache 
bore with it some audacity, and gave a man 
who frankly lived outside the reputable call- 
ings something of the buccaneer. St. Clair 
called himself a gentleman, but did not pre- 
tend to be a clerk, and frankly avowed that he 
was not in trade. Jamie could not make him 
out at all. He hoped, indeed, he was a gen- 
tleman. Had he been in the old country, he 
could have credited it better ; but gentlemen 
without visible means of support were, in those 
days, unusual in Boston." 

To end our rambles here is to leave the so- 

379 



FICTIONAL R A M B L E S 

ciety of a number of interesting characters, 
amonQf whom are old and valued friends for 
whose creation we owe the novelist much ; the 
more that they do not seem to us fictitious, 
but persons of flesh and blood who live and 
move and have their being in the Hub and, to 
the imaginative, people the streets of the Bos- 
ton of yesterday, and the Boston of to-day. 



THE END 



380 



NOV 1( 1902 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



• ll'll Hill Hill || 

014 065 615 A I 




